Build the Future of Cloud-Native Networking! 🚀
The Calico community moves fast. With the releases of Calico 3.30 and 3.31, brings improvements in scalability, network security, and visibility. Now, we want to see what YOU can do with them!
We’re excited to officially invite you to the Project Calico 3.30+ Community Hackathon.
Whether you’re a seasoned eBPF expert or a newcomer to the Gateway API, we welcome your innovation and your ideas!
Table of Contents
🔥 What’s in the Toolkit?
We’ve packed Calico 3.30+ with powerful features ready for you to hack on:
- 🔹 Goldmane & Whisker: High-performance flow insights meets a sleek, operator-friendly UI.
- 🔹 Staged Policies: The “Safety First” way to test Zero Trust before enforcing it.
- 🔹 Calico Ingress Gateway: Modern, Envoy-powered traffic management via the Gateway API.
- 🔹 Calico Cloud Ready: Connect open-source clusters to a free-forever, read-only tier for instant visualization and troubleshooting.
- 🔹 IPAM for Load Balancers: Consistent IP strategies for MetalLB and beyond.
- 🔹 Advanced QoS: Fine-grained bandwidth and packet rate controls.
🛠️ Hackathon Starter Kit
No need to start from a blank screen. Use these progressive GitHub guides to stand up your environment and verify your features in minutes.
Level 1: Bootstrap
Set up a 3-node Kind cluster and install Calico in under 5 minutes.
Level 2: Verification
Ensure your environment is correctly configured for Goldmane, Whisker, and Staged Policies.
Level 3: Expert
Deep-dive into component status and health for advanced observability and automation hacks.
💡 Inspiration: What Can You Build?
Whether you’re a networking guru or an automation enthusiast, Calico 3.30+ provides a massive playground for innovation. Here are three major tracks to spark your imagination:
🔍 Observability & Visibility
Leverage Goldmane and Whisker to make the invisible, visible.
- Flow Insight Dashboards: Create a specialized Grafana dashboard that visualizes the high-performance flow data collected by Goldmane.
- AI Traffic Analysis: Use an LLM to analyze Whisker flow logs to identify and explain unusual traffic patterns in plain English.
- Visual Troubleshooting: Build a workflow that uses the Calico Cloud free tier to pinpoint exactly where a packet is being dropped in a complex microservice architecture.
🛡️ Zero Trust Security
Use Staged Policies to modernize security without the fear of outages.
- Safe Policy CI/CD: Create a GitHub Action that automatically deploys a policy in “Staged” mode and only promotes it to “Enforced” after 24 hours of zero blocked traffic.
- Policy Migration Tool: A script that converts legacy Kubernetes NetworkPolicies into advanced Calico Staged Policies for better auditability.
- Dynamic Quarantine: A tool that detects threats and automatically stages a restrictive policy for an affected namespace.
🌐 Traffic & Infrastructure
Integrate Ingress Gateway and IPAM for rock-solid connectivity.
- Gateway API Demo: Build a multi-tenant app that uses the Calico Ingress Gateway to handle traffic routing and security at the edge.
- MetalLB + IPAM Automation: Showcase a self-healing infrastructure where Calico IPAM dynamically manages LoadBalancer IPs for bare-metal clusters.
- QoS Optimizer: Build a performance-testing tool that demonstrates how Calico’s Advanced QoS controls prevent “noisy neighbors” from slowing down critical workloads.
$1,750 in Total Cash Prizes!
1st Place
$1,000
USD
2nd Place
$500
USD
3rd Place
$250
USD
Plus: Exclusive Calico Hackathon Swag Packs for all winners!
🗓️ Mark Your Calendars
All times in Pacific Time (PT). Don’t let the clock run out!
| Phase | Date |
|---|---|
| 📢 Hackathon Announced: Save the date | Feb 17, 2026 |
| 🚀 Hackathon Officially Opens | Feb 24, 2026 |
| ⏳ Submission Deadline | Mar 31, 2026 @ 11:59 PM PT |
| 🎊 Showcase & Winners Announced | April 2026 |
⚖️ Judging Criteria: How to Win
Our panel of Calico maintainers and community leaders will be scoring projects based on five key pillars. To take home the top prize, aim for a balance of technical execution and real-world impact.
Technical Depth
Does the project meaningfully implement Calico 3.30+ features? We’re looking for high-quality code and a deep understanding of how Goldmane, Whisker, or Staged Policies function.
Creativity & Innovation
Is the idea unique? We love “outside-the-box” thinking—whether it’s a new use case for the Gateway API or a clever integration we haven’t seen before.
Practical Value
Could a real-world Calico user deploy this tomorrow? We value projects that solve actual pain points in networking, security, or cluster operations.
Clarity of Demo
Is your video walkthrough easy to follow? A great project needs a great story—explain the Why, the How, and show us the Result clearly.
Community Impact
Does this benefit the wider open-source ecosystem? Projects that provide educational value, helpful tutorials, or reusable templates will score high here.
Note to Participants: Our judges aren’t just looking for complex code; they’re looking for clarity and usefulness. A simple, well-documented tool that solves a specific problem is often more valuable than a massive, unfinished dashboard!
Ready to show the world what you can build?
