#WorldInnovationDay Tech Showcase

April 16-19 saw people from across the world come together to focus on three Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the #WorldInnovationDay Hackathon. This blog highlights the technologies used to help accelerate the team’s execution. If you want to read more about the event itself – check out this previous blog (here).

Over the course of the weekend, Oracle Cloud tenancies with $500 USD credits were provided to each participant to use. It was not mandated that they use Oracle Cloud nor was it given to participants automatically. It was encouraging to see people open to explore and learn with Oracle Cloud. I want to thank the Oracle mentors supported the participants ensuring that whilst the teams explored, they could confidently execute and deliver. Here are the common requests from teams and the cloud services that they used over the weekend.

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We Need Some Infrastructure

Some teams just wanted infrastructure so they could execute their data engineering pipelines for their Machine Learning; deploy some code for an API; deploy a container using Docker or to host an application. Here are three cloud services that teams gravitated to achieve just that.

Oracle Cloud Compute

With Oracle Cloud Compute, teams were able to provision Virtual Machines (VMs) of different shapes. We saw teams use compute for different purposes whether it was to serve a website using ReactJS or DJango, run a NodeJS server for an API or deploy a simple docker container instance.

To get teams started, we shared this great tutorial (here) to understand the basics of Oracle Cloud Compute including how to configure the network and attach block storage.

To learn more about Oracle Cloud Compute, head (here)

Oracle Object Storage

With Oracle Object Storage, teams were able to share files easily. Sometimes it was to transfer datasets for their data engineering processes and other times it was to host their static websites and make it publicly available.

Teams were familiar with the concept of Object Storage so that was the easy bit. To help them to use Object Storage, we shared a couple of resources. Eg. how to create a bucket in the Oracle Cloud Console (here) or how to use the Command Line Interface (CLI) to upload files to a bucket (here).

Teams also used Object Storage in combination with other cloud services. For example – teams used Oracle Events to trigger APIs when an object was uploaded into an Object Storage bucket or they used Object Storage to load a dataset into Oracle Autonomous Database.

To learn more about Oracle Object Storage, head (here)

Oracle Resource Manager

Oracle Resource Manager (ORM) is an Oracle-managed Terraform as a Service that is freely available in Oracle Cloud. With ORM, teams were able to provision and configure environments (also known as stacks) containing multiple cloud services.

Some out-of-the-box stacks are available in the Oracle Cloud Console itself (here) where there are additional stacks available on github (here) that can be used .

To learn more about Oracle Resource Manager, head (here)

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We Want To Train & Build Our Model

Some teams were focused on AI / ML and looking to use Data Science tools. Common tasks that teams wanted to perform included classifications, feature selections, training and building machine learning models and in a few cases deploying the model as an API. As well as using Object Storage to share and access datasets, here are two additional cloud services that teams used.

Oracle Data Science Cloud

With Oracle Data Science Cloud, teams were up and running within minutes using either CPU or GPU shapes with well known libraries already installed in a Jupyter Notebook session. It was advantageous that most data scientists are familiar with Jupyter Notebooks which meant that the learning was more about what else could they do.

Teams explored the Advanced Data Science (ADS) toolkit to take advantage of the available AutoML, ML Explainability and Model Deployment capabilities. We shared this LiveLab (here) to help guide people through the Data Science Cloud experience and to learn more about the ADS toolkit. Though, some people preferred working through the ADS toolkit documentation (here).

To learn more about Oracle Data Science Cloud, head (here)

Oracle Functions

Oracle Functions is an Oracle-managed Serverless as a Service powered by the Fn Project open source engine. You can learn more about the Fn Project here.

Some teams, used ADS to deploy models as a serverless function using Oracle Functions. The steps to do this are in the documentation (here).

To learn more about Oracle Functions, head (here)

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We Want To Engage With People

Some teams wanted to engage with their users. This was either to visualise data or to build an application. If the team had software development skills, they typically chose to deploy their solution on Oracle Cloud Compute. Some teams didn’t have that option. And hence looked at these cloud services to help them execute.

Oracle Analytics Cloud

With Oracle Analytics Cloud, teams were able to use its self-service analytics and no-code approach to visualisation to tell their (data) stories. Some teams had CSV datasets that they wanted to analyse and visualise. There were other teams didn’t have the time or the necessary skills to develop their own dashboards and hence found Oracle Analytics Cloud productive.

We shared this LiveLab (here) to help people provision Oracle Analytics Cloud and to get started with doing their own self-service analytics.

To learn more about Oracle Analytics Cloud, head (here)

Oracle APEX – Application Express

With Oracle APEX, teams wanting to build data-driven applications quickly and with little or no code at all. Building an application from a spreadsheet or building a rapid prototype were a couple of ways that teams were highly effective. And some teams didn’t have access to a software or web developer.

We shared these LiveLabs (here) to help these teams get started with APEX.

To learn more about Oracle APEX, head (here)

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And this is only a subset of cloud services that we have on offer as part of Oracle Cloud that could have been used as part of teams’ solutions.

It is hard sometimes to pick up a new technology and to be effective. It is even harder still when you do this with a very short timeframe and with a team of people that you’ve just met. #kudos to the teams that explored and learnt something new with Oracle Cloud.

If you want to try this out and you want an environment to explore and learn like these teams did – head to the following link and sign-up to Oracle Cloud (here). Reach out as I’d be keen to help out where I can. And if you have something to share, let me know. I’d be be keen to learn more about what you are doing and maybe there is something that we can create together and promote as well.