Author(s): Leapfrog Technology

Originally published on Towards AI.

What happens when you challenge Leapfrog’s best Ops talent to do what they do best?

For the past two months, inside Leapfrog, the air felt thick with steaming coffee and the hum of competition. We put our seasoned Ops engineers on a new mission, “Leapfrog DevOps Hackathon 2025”, with the theme — innovate and automate, committing fully to the open-source ethos.

The event concluded as a strategic success for our Open Source DevOps Initiatives, delivering a robust portfolio of community-driven tools engineered to directly solve real-world problems, mostly using AWS. This is the story of the groundbreaking projects that came out of it, the teamwork that made the magic happen, and the brilliant engineers who got the job done.

The mission: Open source for operational excellence

Open source has always been part of Leapfrog’s DNA — a reflection of how we learn, build, and give back. This challenge, however, went further, providing the opportunity to push boundaries, take ownership, and shape tools that could simplify real-world engineering problems.

Building on the success of prior internal initiatives, this event was formalized to maximize our organizational impact and strategically codify our approach. The core objective was to conceive, develop, and publish practical open-source tools that fundamentally enhance operational efficiency across Leapfrog while contributing meaningfully to the broader IT community. This mission of open source for operational excellence was structured around four primary objectives:

• Drive innovation: Create and validate new, innovative open-source solutions.
• Enhance efficiency: Automate workflows, improve system reliability, and strengthen security.
• Promote collaboration: Foster cross-functional teamwork across Ops domains.
• Contribute globally: Publish valuable tools to the open-source community.

The projects: 5 teams, 5 game-changing tools

Over the intense 60-day development cycle, five dedicated teams worked relentlessly, successfully transforming complex operational hurdles into elegant, high-impact open-source solutions.

Here’s a look at the innovative tools they showcased during the final project demonstration:

Team 1: GHA — The local CI/CD powerhouse

• Team Members: Milan Pokhrel, Shiva Gaihre, Bibek Kumar Labh, Palson Kansakar, Samrakshak Karki
• About project: GHA is a powerful command-line interface (CLI) tool that redefines local GitHub Actions workflow management. It enables developers to fully simulate, debug, and manage CI/CD pipelines directly from their terminal. The tool includes critical, high-level features such as OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication in cloud like AWS, Azure, and advanced custom runner provisioning.
• The Impact: Slashing development-to-deployment time by enabling local testing of complex CI/CD setups.
• Open Source Codebase: Link to GHA GitHub repository

Team 2: LeapAD — Active directory, serverless style

• Team Members: Prayatna koirala, Sagar Neupane, Gaurab Upreti, Bibek Mishra, Bipin Pandey
• About project: LeapAD is a modern, serverless web application designed to streamline Active Directory (AD) administration. Built with the React and Flask frameworks, it offers an intuitive, secure interface for seamless AD integration and effectively eliminates the requirement for costly third-party vendor solutions.
• The Impact: Delivers a cost-effective and near-zero infrastructure method for managing user accounts, group assignments, and role-based access control (RBAC) within Active Directory.
• Open Source Codebase: Link to LeapAD GitHub repository

Team 3: Terraformers — Infrastructure as database-code

• Team Members: Sparsha Dotel, Dipendra Shrestha, Priyanka Tuladhar, Narayan Shresth, Saroj Shah
• The project: A Custom Terraform Provider for Database Management. This tool enables seamless automation and governance of database systems (like SQL Server) directly through Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) principles. It manages critical functions including database provisioning, user authentication, and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enforcement.
• The Impact: Enforces consistent security policies and standardizes database lifecycle operations, resulting in a drastic reduction in manual administrative overhead.
• Open Source Codebase: Link to terraform-provider-mssql GitHub repository

Team 4: Finleap — FinOps clarity at the user level

• Team Members: Amit Joshi, Pranav Pudasaini, Ishwar Khadka, Srijal Karmacharya, Diwas Neupane, Prajwol Shakya
• The Tool: Finleap is a FinOps application that provides granular, user-level visibility into AWS cloud expenditure. It resolves the complex challenge of accurately attributing cloud costs to individual engineers or specific engineering teams through a highly intuitive user interface (UI) specifically using AWS services like BedRock, Lambda, and so on for Gen AI frameworks.
• The Impact: Empowers engineering teams with clear financial accountability and enables rapid, proactive analysis necessary to optimize cloud costs and enforce budget adherence.
• Open Source Codebase: Link to FinLeap GitHub repository

Team 5: Terraform Analyzer — AI-powered debugging and costing

• Team Members: Mahesh Regmi, Santosh Bhandari, Ankit Karna, Binaya Dahal, Jenith Shrestha, Rabindra Raj Sah
• The Tool: Terraform Analyzer and Cost Calculator is an AI-powered DevOps automation tool that scans CI/CD execution logs, identifies cryptic Terraform configuration errors, and leverages OpenAI’s GPT-4.1-nano engine to suggest and apply safe, automated remediation. It further integrates Infracost for real-time, predictive AWS cost estimations.
• The Impact: Achieves a drastic reduction in debugging time, improved infrastructure reliability, and provides clear financial visibility directly integrated within the standard Pull Request workflow.
• Open Source Codebase: Link to Terraform-analyzer GitHub repository

The outcome: Highlights of the event

Over the course of just two months, our teams achieved remarkable results:

• Developed five fully functional open-source tools
• Strengthened cross-domain collaboration
• Gained hands-on experience with Go, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and AWS tooling
• Cultivated a strong culture of collective innovation

Our judges, Anish Krishna Manandhar, Principal Architect, Development, and Rajiv Shakya, Solution Architect, Development, thoughtfully evaluated across rigorous criteria and provided the guidance that helped shape each project.

One of the judges shared, “The winning team demonstrated not only technical mastery but also a deep understanding of a recurring operational challenge. Their solution is immediately usable, highly scalable, and closely aligned with the principles of open-source contribution.”

After a highly competitive round and careful deliberation, the judges announced the champions of the Open Source DevOps Initiatives 2025:

🏆 Winner: Terraform Analyzer

🏅 Runner-up: Finleap

Though Terraform Analyzer and Finleap teams received the top designation, the caliber and robustness of the entire project team were impressive. The projects collectively showcase the versatility of the technology and the empowerment of engineers to drive significant change from the ground up.

Congratulations to the winners and to all teams for delivering such impactful, groundbreaking projects that substantially strengthen both Leapfrog’s infrastructure and the broader open-source ecosystem.

Looking ahead: Our open source commitment

This event was more than a competition; it was a strong affirmation of Leapfrog’s dedication and commitment to both internal innovation and external contribution.

🚀 Key achievements: 25+ participants, 5 innovative tools, and a strong culture of collaboration built across operational domains.

🌐 Public release: All repositories are being prepared for public release under Leapfrog’s GitHub Organization, making them accessible for adoption by the global IT community.

We are incredibly proud of our Ops team for their dedication, technical excellence, and the collaborative spirit they brought to this challenge. We look forward to seeing these tools embraced, evolved, and expanded by developers worldwide, further strengthening the open-source ecosystem.

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Published via Towards AI