Infosys “OpenHack” Development Program Features Couchbase

Couchbase is expanding its partnerships with industry-leading global systems integrators and regional solution providers.  Through these partnerships, Couchbase’s unique capabilities can be delivered to our global footprint of enterprise customers. We collaborate closely with our Strategic Alliance partner Infosys to ensure their subject matter experts are accredited and up-to-date on Couchbase’s latest features and capabilities.

Toward that end, we are excited to write about the recent conclusion of Infosys’s OpenHack featuring Couchbase, which kicked-off at Infosys HQ in Bangalore on 31-July and had run for 5 weeks, culminating with an awards ceremony on 4-Sep. This event was sponsored by Infosys’ Open Source practice which drew more than 400 participants from across various service lines cutting across geographies.

Infosys and Couchbase leaders at Hackathon Closing Ceremony 4-Sep

Infosys partners with Couchbase to deliver powerful digital transformation solutions in areas like modernizing legacy applications that are limited by existing RDBMS and modernizing Field Service applications with Couchbase’s mobile stack.  Also, Couchbase and Infosys work together on “cloud-native” projects including the development of new age applications for the digital world.

Infosys and Couchbase collaborated to define several use case areas to help focus solution prototype development for the Hackathon participants after closely studying the needs across the industry verticals for NoSQL databases and to help support technical enablement of certain Couchbase services and capabilities.

Use cases addressed the following areas:

• Moving database workloads from traditional RDBMS to Couchbase,

• Leveraging Mobile Lite and Sync Gateway to build an “offline first” mobile app,

• Building a data platform for microservices-based apps leveraging the Autonomous Operator,

• Translating SQL queries to N1QL (SQL for JSON) to accelerate modernization of legacy apps, and

• Using Couchbase as a datastore for time series and analytical Fin Serv apps.

Infosys participants organized themselves into teams of 3, and each team then picked one use case to pursue, based on their interest area or needs they see within their client projects.

Senior architects, both from Couchbase and Infosys, played the role of “master hacks,” guiding, mentoring and reviewing the solutions being built by each of the teams at various phases of the Hackathon.  As the Hackathon progressed participating teams presented working solutions to the master hacks. The master hacks were amazed at the speed with which the teams were able to adopt the Couchbase product, leverage its wide range of features, and come out with some very exciting and innovative solutions.

Here’s a snapshot of what was accomplished.

What a phenomenal response we had from the Infoscion fraternity!

• 412 registered participants

• 193 teams formed

• 74 solutions created and submitted for review

• 300+ Accredited Couchbase experts

• 3 Solution team Winners, +1 special recognition mention

Here is a glimpse of solutions that have come out from Winning Hackathon teams. The solutions were judged under three categories listed below.

• Most Impressive Technical Solution
  • Navigation Mobile App

    • Designed to help Infosys employees and visitors move around the large Infosys campuses to locate locations like meeting/conference rooms, specific cubicles, etc. even when they are offline or in a low network bandwidth zone.

      • This app leverages the entire Couchbase mobile stack comprising of Couchbase mobile lite, sync gateway, geospatial querying ability and the database server.

      • Augmented reality tools to visualize locations on the mobile app and guide users to the searched location.

      • Google maps for mapping walkways, driveways within their campuses

• Most Impactful Implementation Solution
  • Data Platform for Microservice-based Applications

    • Created a highly scalable data platform for individual microservices architecture-based applications.

      • The Couchbase autonomous operator for the OpenShift platform was leveraged to create this data platform.

• Most Valuable Solution
  • SQL-N1QL Convertor

    • Built a framework that can translate embedded SQL queries in Java/.NET application code accessing a relational database (Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, etc.) and translates the same to corresponding N1QL queries.

      • This aids in quickly migrating applications from using traditional RDBMS databases to modern NoSQL databases.

A high-level flow diagram of the solution.

• Special Recognition Category
  • RDBMS to Couchbase Data Migration Utility

    • Built a data migration utility that can model and migrate data from a relational database to a Couchbase database.

      • The utility generates JSON documents after the modeling exercise which is further imported into Couchbase database using its fast CB-Import utility.

In addition to these deserving and innovative solution teams, it was exciting for the master hacks to see the enthusiasm and “a-ha!” moments from the Infosys developer and architect teams.

“N1QL is like SQL on steroids.” – OpenHack Participant

“Couchbase is easy to learn and incorporate as N1QL query is similar to SQL” – OpenHack Participant

“Couchbase is a powerful database for Big Data; handling and processing queries at a faster pace.” – OpenHack Participant

“Couchbase is a wonderful NOSQL platform… “ – OpenHack Participant

Thank you to Infosys and OpenHack participants for such an exciting few weeks. Overall, the event was very successful and we saw a large group of Infoscions getting enabled with the cutting edge Couchbase data platform. We look forward to bringing these solution capabilities to our joint customers.