A Cloud-Based Data Collaborative to Combat the COVID-19 Pandemic and to Solve Major Technology Challenges

The XPRIZE Foundation designs and operates multi-million-dollar, global competitions to incentivize the development of technological breakthroughs that accelerate humanity toward a better future. To combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the Foundation coordinated with several organizations to make available data sets about different facets of the disease and to provide the computational resources needed to analyze those data sets. This approach fits in with the XPRIZE Foundation’s pre-pandemic plans to host contests that require analysis of data sets while providing the computation resources to those data sets to make it possible for a wide range of teams to be able to compete – democratizing data and its analysis. We describe the requirements, design, and implementation of the XPRIZE Data Collaborative, a cloud-based infrastructure that enables the XPRIZE to meet its COVID-19 mission and host future data-centric competitions. We offer our experiences as a case study of a Cloud Native application from design to implementation, one that used a surprising variety of Cloud services, technologies, and design patterns, from containers to VMs to serverless computing. We include our experiences of having users successfully exercise the Data Collaborative, detailing the challenges encountered and areas for possible improvement.