Red Hat Hackfest hub

Red Hat Hackfest addresses partners' need to meet the demand of complex digital transformation projects and ensure a growing pipeline, while broadening the skills of our partner ecosystem. Partners can also expect:

• A community of active partners innovating on Red Hat technology
• An increase in partner delivery capabilities
• The same experience, expertise, and skills from taking part with customers - leading to cross educational opportunities and sharing best practices
• A faster time to market for projects where customers are investing (AI/ML, Edge, and IoT) using partners’ skills on Red Hat technology
• A broadening of partner skills across all Red Hat technologies
• The use of blueprints scales success, helping micro-communities develop by offering a best practice framework

Red Hat Hackfest brings customers and partners together to create a solution that meets customers’ business issues and gives them a competitive edge in the market. Many customers may lack the resources necessary to manage new and legacy technology or find it hard to access solutions that address their specific pain points. At Red Hat Hackfest, customers can find:

• Fast track development and implementation of IT solutions, as all relevant partners are involved from the outset
• An end-to-end, interoperable solution that addresses legacy integration and provides management and support services to free up the IT team.

The results of previous Hackfest sessions have been many and include the following:

• Red Hat EMEA Partners are working on a variety of edge/dx customer projects, supported by Intel and Red Hat, across EMEA
• The Hackfest team, in collaboration with Intel and the Hackfest partners, has officially released a Proof of Concept (PoC) for Edge Computing verticals: Manufacturing and Smart Cities

​The Hackfest environment has facilitated the business impact of the ecosystem on customer challenges:

• Partners have strengthened their visibility and value proposition through official collaboration with the Hackfest entities. Read a blog post from a Hackfest winner. 
• Intel and Red Hat can now count on a substantial group of partners and a deep source of knowledge and tools to quickly react to support requests from customers.

Thanks to the contributions to the work of the Hackfest technical team, Red Hat business units are now closer to the Red Hat Ecosystem and are facilitating the adoption and awareness of the latest and greatest from the Red Hat and Intel portfolio:

• Single Node Openshift
• RHEL for Edge
• Red Hat Build of Quarkus
• Microshift
• Ansible

Red Hat Hackfest was originally created in 2019 on the theory that Partners deserved something more - hands-on experience, real life experience - that would benefit Red Hat, the Partner, and their customers, so a challenge was created for Partners to work on pieces of a complex solution. 

The first Hackfest was "Red Hat Hackfest for EMEA on Edge SmartCities" in August of 2020. The challenge was to simulate a T-shirt production plant from a production model distributed to facilities and, in turn, to machineries from a central datacenter with event handling, security,  and workload distributed over geo-localized facilities and networks.

The next Hackfest, in February/March of 2021, was "Red Hat Hackfest for EMEA on Edge SmartCities v2." This challenge was to set up a European environmental sensor network with our App Dev Partners, based on Red Hat technology and to document the effects of COVID-19 on the air quality over time. One of the winners, in the country of Georgia, has already kicked off three projects using our technology: two digital transformation projects and one IoT project. It’s projects like these that really showcase the impact, skills, and knowledge garnered from Hackfest.

The next one, "Red Hat Hackfest for EMEA on Edge Manufacturing," was held in September/October of 2021 in collaboration with IBM and Intel. The challenge was the same as the last one: to set up a European environmental sensor network with our App Dev Partners, based on a secured stack Red Hat technology and to document the effects of COVID-19 on the air quality over time.

The most recent Hackfest is happening for our Asia Pacific region in September/October of 2022 in collaboration with Amazon Web Services and Intel. More information will be posted as it becomes available.