Cisco, IBM, and VMware are among a handful of vendors partnering with the Linux Foundation on an initiative using open source technologies to help public health authorities in their fight against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and future health epidemics. Former Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) executive director Dan Kohn leads the new project.

The Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) initiative launches with a pair of hosted projects that are currently used as exposure notification platforms targeting COVID-19. The first is COVID Shield, which is being deployed in Canada, and the second is COVID Green, which is being used by Ireland’s Health Services Executive.

COVID Shield was developed by a team of 40 volunteer developers at Shopify and the Ontario and Canadian Digital Services. It uses exposure tracing and notification technology provided by Google and Apple.

A team at NearForm that worked with the Irish government on its COVID-19 response developed COVID Green. Ireland’s Health Services deployed COVID Green two weeks ago, and since then more than one-third of that country’s adults have adopted the application. NearForm is also one of the initial LFPH launch partners along with Cisco, IBM, VMware, Geometer, Tencent, and doc.ai.

Public health agencies and their IT departments can use and customize the platforms as needed.

The Linux Foundation is also touting the TCN Coalition as part of its LFPH effort. That work focuses on the development of privacy-preserving and cross-compatible exposure notification applications. It also supports public health authorities as they work with application-building teams and IT providers.

An LFPH landscape map tracks the various public health projects.

Kohn headed up CNCF since mid-2016, steering that organization from an upstart under the vast Linux Foundation umbrella to a significant driver of the rapidly expanding cloud native movement. Much of that was based on the Kubernetes project, which has become a staple of the cloud-native ecosystem. Kohn left that post earlier this year and was replaced by Priyanka Sharma.

The LFPH work follows what has been a number of initiatives targeted at using technology to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Microsoft, Google, and Rescale earlier this year teamed up to offer free high-performance computing (HPC) resources to researchers through the Tech Against Covid project. That work is designed to allow researchers to run simulations using Rescale’s platform combined with Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure cloud computing resources without setup time or IT teams.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) also committed at least $20 million for COVID-19 diagnostic research and testing via its AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, while Cisco and Dell Technologies donated millions of dollars to help remote workers with networking and security while working from home as well as help communities treat and contain COVID-19.

And IBM formed an HPC consortium with the White House to help with research tied to COVID-19.