Virtusa announces first Inter-University SRE Hackathon

Virtusa, a global provider of digital strategy, digital engineering, and IT services and solutions, announced Sri Lanka’s inaugural Inter-University SRE Hackathon, the first national level TechOps competition focused on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) – an approach to IT operations that focuses on reliability, performance, latency and availability. The sprint will take place on the 26th of November 2021 on a virtual platform, with the winners walking away with top honors, cash prizes and job opportunities at Virtusa. Keeping up with the spirit of innovation and fusion of blockchain with SRE, unique attendance NFT (Non-Fungible Token) badges based on POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) will be awarded to all participants.

“Not only is this hackathon a premier talent hunt across the country, it is also a great channel for engagement with the next generation of IT professionals,” commented Suweda Rajaratnam – Head of Campus Reach Sri Lanka – Virtusa’s industry-academia partnership initiative. “By introducing globally trending tools and best practices such as SRE through hackathons and other curricular-related initiatives, Virtusa continues to empower IT students to be workforce ready and adaptable to the industry’s rapid pace of evolution.”

This hackathon aims to equip university students with SRE best practices across an IT landscape that is fast adopting a reliability-first mindset, a niche skill and sure advantage to support their future career trajectories in the industry. A total number of 12 teams have been nominated from eight local universities; namely University of Moratuwa, University of Colombo, University of Jaffna, NSBM Green University, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT), Java Institute, Horizon Campus and ESOFT Metro Campus.

Misnad Haque, Senior Director of Technology at Virtusa said, “Hackathons and events of this nature give university students an unparalleled opportunity to experience a real-world mission-critical operations environment, while giving Virtusa an opportunity to harness talent across high-demand, evolving industry trends. We look forward to witnessing intense competition from the teams, and evaluate the benchmark of the future of our industry.”

The teams will be tasked with creating automation tools and methodologies to address IT operations such as application deployment, causal analysis and observability. A panel of Virtusa experts will evaluate the final prototypes based on best practices, collaboration, creativity, and competition, followed by the winner’s announcement later during the day.