Contest Brief

The Problem:

Running complex applications in multiple environments in IBM Cloud can be a daunting task. There are multiple dimensions that are difficult to visualize.

Users need to instantly identify what is running, the particular network or resource group it is running in and the specific cloud accounts being used.

This complexity makes onboarding new members to the team lengthy. It can take weeks for new members to finally understand the system they're working with. Manually documenting deployments is also inefficient, as its time consuming and quickly falls out of date.

What we need from you:

We need you to create a UI design and build a proof of concept of a web app that allows users to graphically visualize their IBM Cloud resources. Several visualizations should be designed (although only one needs to be implemented in the POC for this contest).

The objective is to design an application (deployed in a container) that can produce several graphical views of your IBM Cloud resources.

These views would include things like:

Infrastructure (showing baremetal/virtual machines and how they are grouped into VPCs and connected to gateways etc)
Kubernetes (showing pods and what incoming/outgoing calls are made to other services)
Security (showing how resources use ServiceIDs and access groups, and are collected into resource groups)
HA (showing how resources are distributed across data-centers/regions)
Enterprise (showing account hierarchy and resource composition in each account)

Supporting details to include in the submission:

In addition to UI mockups, development notes, architecture diagrams, etc. the contest winner will deliver a proof of concept application that renders at least one view (and implements the navigation so that you can see how the final app would work).

Rendering a view will require querying IBM Cloud APIs to get the data and then render that data into an appropriate view.

Solution may leverage any number of open source projects (as long as they don't include a copyleft license).

Prizes:

The contest winner will receive $10k. The next two runners up will receive $2.5k.

The top 3 entries have the opportunity to bid on further high value projects working towards a complete implementation of this idea.

Here are some resources to assist you:

IBM Cloud Platform API docs: [login to view URL]

Shortened Link – [login to view URL]

Resource groups – [login to view URL]
Resource controller – [login to view URL]
Global search: [login to view URL]
VPC Docs: [login to view URL]
Access Groups: [login to view URL]
For visualizing kub app connections – Kiali / Istio: [login to view URL]

Feel free to comment with any questions.

Good luck!