Rafay’s (AI) Hackathon 2023: Product Advancements To Improve Our Customers’ Experience & Our Internal Efficiencies

We just wrapped up our annual hackathon earlier this month. The theme and focus for this hackathon was AI and Generative AI and our teams had the opportunity to prototype and demonstrate fascinating solutions esp. based on Generative AI. 

We had eleven (11) fully functioning submissions spanning both external and internal use cases. The panel that reviewed and judged the submissions observed extensive use of the following technologies associated with Generative AI.

Background 

The Rafay engineering team gets to spend a lot of time with customers and colleagues in functions such as product marketing, product management, solution architects, product support, customer success, operations, etc. 

Given the amount of time they spend in the trenches with our customers, we strongly believe that given the opportunity, some of our most innovative ideas will come from this team. In fact, many of our established, market-leading capabilities such as cluster blueprints and zero trust access were the result of similar exercises a few years back. 

Highlights 

The submissions this year spanned interesting ideas such as the following: 

• What would the user experience be like if we had AI assisting the end user as they interacted with the Rafay platform? 
• What if we provided a conversational interface for users of the Rafay platform, completely transforming the user experience? 
• Given a containerized app, can we automatically recommend the most cost optimal instance types for worker nodes on public clouds? 
• How can we help streamline troubleshooting if we provide our customers with an AI bot in the platform that has been specifically trained on Rafay docs, knowledge base, etc?
• Can we provide a conversational interface for users where the platform will automatically generate declarative specifications or Terraform code based on natural language input provided by the user? 

In the next few blogs, I plan to describe and showcase some of the winning hackathon submissions that we are investing in to add to our platform.