On the 3rd of December, 2022 the Laboratory for Internet Computing of the University of Cyprus (UCY), under the context of RAINBOW H2020 project, organized a Hackathon Tutorial event titled “Building Internet of Things Applications with Docker Containers”. The Hackathon Tutorial was addressed to undergraduate and master students as well as PhD candidates, of the University of Cyprus, Department of Computer Science, with basic knowledge of coding (in Python) and Linux OS.
The event was kicked off by the Associate Professor George Pallis who made a brief introduction of the project RAINBOW to the participants, to IoT technologies and how specific use cases, like industrial IoT deployments, smart-cities, and surveillance via drones, can be transformed to be deployable on a Fog infrastructure. Then, a hands-on tutorial took place, with the participants having the opportunity to be familiarized with the Docker ecosystem and understand concepts like docker containers, images, their creation process, networking, observability, and multi-service/multi-host deployments. Subsequently, the RAINBOW project was presented as a Fog Computing platform that offers a better solution for the deployment and management of cross-cloud applications than the current state of the art, and presenters highlighted its benefits and usability. Then the participants were divided into several teams. They deployed a distributed ML inference application on Raspberry PIs (we provided 6 RPi version 4) and got familiar with the Fog ecosystem and Docker technologies. The final challenge of the participants was to deploy the latter application via the RAINBOW dashboard, extract user-defined metrics, and design a related analytic query. Finally, each team demonstrated live their deployment and presented the selected application-level metric and the respective analytic query. The team that won completed the deployment faster than the other teams and also presented the most useful results. All participants received a Raspberry Pi Pico, gadgets and a certification of participation. During the activity, Moysis Symeonides, Joanna Georgiou, Demetra Katziani and Nikolas Petrou from the Laboratory for Internet Computing (LInC – UCY) supported all the participants during the Hackathon tutorial session. By the motivation provided for the activity challenge as well as the capabilities offered by the RAINBOW platform, the teams were encouraged into developing their own unique solutions by tackling any technical barriers after they have understood the scope and the potential of the offered tools and technologies. Students benefitted by being introduced to the complete pipeline of the development and deployment of modern IoT applications while getting themselves familiarized with the use of docker technology and with RAINBOW’s advanced data management stack for handling data processing in distributed topologies with limited resources, such as Fog networks.
