World Health Organization applies Red Hat open source technology

2020: Creating a long-term open source development infrastructure

On November 25, 2020, Red Hat announced a collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) to create a long-term open source development infrastructure to build the Learning Experience Platform (LXP) of the modern WHO Academy training center.

According to the company, in the course of solving this problem, modern methods of Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, Open Practice Library, as well as open source technologies of Red Hat community projects were used. WHO has created a scalable and flexible DevOps platform to address challenges such as management, assembly testing, code analysis, and data visualization to accelerate access to current health knowledge and reduce the amount of inaccurate information.

COVID-19 data is updated almost daily, and health workers should be aware of the latest and most accurate information. As the timely provision of information becomes crucial, WHO is faced with the need to improve its digital capabilities to respond to and respond to the rapidly changing needs of health workers around the world. The organization decided to accelerate the dissemination of knowledge and objective data to practitioners, health policy makers and its own staff by working closely with Red Hat to implement working methods.

The WHO devOps platform is designed to address both current and current challenges, such as dealing with inaccurate information, and to acquire the skills needed to create a training methodology. The organization wanted to lay the groundwork for building an open data model capable of meeting the future needs of health workers, including offering more personalized learning experiences.

A team of WHO specialists spent two months at the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs virtual training center, where they worked closely with Red Hat experts to solve this problem. Red Hat Open Innovation Labs is designed to help organizations learn how to bring staff, practices, and technologies together to accelerate software and product development, drive innovation, and address internal organization challenges in a short time frame.

As part of this initiative, the WHO Information Management and Technology team mastered agile methodology, software development based on the principles of lean production and DevOps practice, learning to apply them in parallel with their current, more traditional approaches to project management. This was to optimize adaptability to changing needs and help make the WHO DevOps platform more scalable in the short and long term. The skills and tools gained at Red Hat Open Innovation Labs helped lay the foundation for a learning system that does not close on specific people or technology. Instead, the WHO team now has the holistic knowledge and skills to manage its new platform and internal processes to move forward.

From the outset, WHO has been determined to create an open-source platform, as they are well placed on the organization's principles of building international cooperation and ensuring the physical and economic accessibility of solutions, which is especially important for low- and middle-income countries.

The LXP system will be fully built on Red Hat open hybrid cloud technologies, enabling WHO to provide a scalable, flexible and safer platform. As part of this platform, Red Hat OpenShift is responsible for the cloud-native foundation, an optimized environment for creating and deploying container applications, and tools for working with application metrics. The solution also includes Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces, which provides LXP application developers with the foundation of Kubernetes development. By opting for open code, WHO has gained more opportunities for iterative and phased implementation of architectures and applications to support medical professionals around the world in real time. In addition, as a Kubernetes platform without a hard link to a particular cloud, Red Hat OpenShift allows WHO to freely scale LXP by choosing the optimal cloud platforms of various suppliers.

It was an honor to work with WHO to develop an open source platform that could influence how the world responds not only to the COVID crisis, but also to future health emergencies. With the help of Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, WHO has overcome traditional IT barriers by switching to a DevOps methodology, and solved existing problems through collaboration, hard work and innovative thinking. As a result, the agency, with the support of Red Hat, created a DevOps platform that will help provide knowledge to healthcare professionals around the world. narrated by Hans Roth, senior vice president of Red Hat and general manager of Global Services

Working within the framework of Red Hat Open Innovation Labs has provided a more flexible and responsive approach to creating solutions based on open source technologies. We have succeeded in creating a DevOps platform that can not only provide healthcare professionals worldwide with relevant, timely information and knowledge related to COVID, but also scale and adapt to future needs. told Bernardo Mariano, CIO and Director of Digital Health, World Health Organization