For more than a year, the European GAIA-Xproject has been in the news. With its objective of offering a cloud computing service in Europe and a European data infrastructure, the initiative is undoubtedly ambitious. In a move to get more and more into the thick of things, a hackathon will be organised around GAIA-X with the aim of increasing the technology-related skills within the expert community in the interest of the GAIA-X ecosystem.

The official GAIA-X hackathon: several hackathon sessions and components in one

Scheduled for August 30-31, the first edition of the official GAIA-X hackathon will be launched. This two-day event will focus on specific components of the Gaia-X architecture, namely:

• Self-descriptions service: self-descriptions for the two scenarios discussed in Streams 1 and 2 will be created and the current set of mandatory attributes in the self-descriptions will be challenged based on the requirements derived from the discussed scenarios.
• Service Orchestration: TOSCA for describing multi-vendor scenarios will be explored and evaluated. Additional emphasis will be placed on the mechanisms for integrating autodescriptions into the orchestration.
• Service Identity & Access Management: an identity management approach will be selected and proposed for the implementation of the scenarios implemented in streams 1 and 2. In addition, a solution will be proposed to ensure that the access control requirements formulated in the self-descriptions are guaranteed during execution.
• Federated Interconnction/Networking: Concepts for integrating interconnection and networking aspects into the scenarios will be developed and a detailed technical outline on how network services can be exploited when orchestrating applications will be created.

Demo and presentation sessions in parallel to the hackathon

During the two days, in addition to each of the sessions dealing with the components of GAIA-X, several presentation and demonstration sessions will be organized in parallel to the hackathon:

• Two presentation and support sessions: the first on the payload (a machine learning and data delivery service is to be selected/enhanced/developed and will be used in the scenarios) and the second on the infrastructure.
• Several demo sessions with Peter Koen from Microsoft about SSI, Stefan Ettl and Jim Marino from Catena-X about the Eclipse data connector, Patrick Hebant and Jean-François Cases from Amadeus about the link between Data Mesh and GXFS, and Michael Schäfer from Bosch about Business Partner Agent / B2B and link to service offerings.

Gaia-X Association CEO Francesco Bonfiglio commented on the implementation of the hackathon:

“The hackathons contribute to the construction of our Minimum Viable Project and will support the overall effort of all the working tables of the association, testing their principles. Like a Formula 1 team, we need brave drivers and a strong team working together to test and improve racing. Our intention is to enable people who know how to do things to do them, regardless of their role in an organization, the size of their company and their nationality. Gaia-X is becoming a reality day by day, and we are proud of it.”

It is quite possible to register for this event, free of charge, by following the link below.

Translated from GAIA-X : l’association de cloud computing européen organise la première édition de son hackathon