Keynote: COVID Tracker - Testing & Contact Tracing: How Ireland is Battling COVID-19

COVID-19 hit; country by country the world ground to a halt. We all became familiar with the headline stats, epidemiology became an interesting new profession. The R-number and contact tracing entered our lexicon as things we all knew about. Many countries had started on similar journeys to build systems that could use technology to identify people who are too close for too long where one has COVID-19. Openness and sharing defined the global approach to solving this problem. This presentation tells the story of how in 100 days an app was delivered; we also explore how Irish Government and the Irish Health service leverage CNCF projects in particular Kubernetes to respond to the crisis. The pandemic has also redefined how governments broadly are using OSS technologies to tackle major challenges. It’s a story of rapid decision-making, global collaboration, intense external scrutiny and hopefully redemption.