Juju starts Charm Championship with rewards of $10,000

What is "Juju" Actually?

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PRIZES

$10,000 USD prize for each category:

In addition individual charm maintainers of a reviewed charm in the “reviewed” section of the Charm Store receive $200 if their charm is included in a winning template. This can be awarded multiple times, to a maximum total of $3,000 per category.

Winners in three categories

• High Availability - represents a full stack of HA-enabled services to accomplish a task.
• Data Mining - represents a full stack of data mining and “big data” analysis.
• Monitoring - represents a full stack of monitoring solutions for existing services.

FAQ
Q: Who should participate?

A: Anyone who has an infrastucture stack in the cloud and is interested in managing complex services.

Q: Where can I ask questions and discuss the prizes?

A: There is a mailing list for it here.

Q: How do I actually contribute?

A: See this page with the step by step. But basically, model your stack in Juju, export it, and submit the yaml file via github.

Q: Aren’t you just doing this to get a bunch of free work?

A: NO! The charms in the Charm Store are Free Software that we want people to improve to drive knowledge sharing between devops forward. Keep your secret sauce secret, we want to concentrate on improving the blocks people use to build their infrastructure.

BASELINE RULES

• Communication
• Entrants are encouraged to join the Juju mailing list for updates about the competition.
• Entrants MUST fill out this form to be eligible for the prizes.

• Submission
• Charms that are to be submitted for the charm maintainer prize must do so via the contribution steps. For help, contact us via the mailing list or #juju on Freenode.
• All entries must be submitted for Ubuntu 12.04.
• Each participant (or participant organisation) may submit as many bundles as they wish, but a maximum of two will be considered in the contest. All deployment bundles and charms must be the participant’s original work.
• Optionally, submit an RFP to receive feedback. Feel free to mail jorge@ubuntu.com with your idea if you want the team to review it.

• Work must endeavour to be production quality, not a cowboy script or proof of concept.

• The four-judge panel will select the best bundle: Mark Mims, Marco Ceppi, Kapil Thangavelu and Adrian Cockroft. The winner will be chosen at the judges’ discretion. Judges’ decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into. Judges do not have to pick a winner for each category if the entries are deemed undeserving of a prize.

JUDGEMENT CRITERIA

• Straightforward: It does what is says it does, and the README is detailed enough for any user to be able to deploy your bundle. Pretend you’ve hired a new sysadmin who needs to deploy your entire infrastructure in a new datacenter.

• High Quality: Each charm in a bundle will be judged according to the charm quality guidelines:
• Must include charm integration tests in the individual charms. The bundle itself will also be judged according to this criteria
• Depth and breadth of the bundle’s included tests weight heavily.
• Charm Quality Score of the entire bundle will be taken into heavy consideration to determine how robust the charms are.
• 25 on the Charm Rating scale is the baseline, charms not meeting this baseline will be considered detrimental to the bundle’s overall quality.

• Complexity: Are you solving an interesting infrastructure problem for a complex stack? Does it solve infrastructure “gunk”?
• Extra points for going deep on identified problem area.

• Completeness: The completeness of each bundle will be reviewed. Ideally a bundle exposes the configuration services via Juju so the user doesn’t have to remember where to set things by hand.

• Integration with other services: A mature stack should include charms that integrate with other charms, and have hooks to enable them to be monitored, cached, and do whatever other things you can think of.

• Robustness of the bundle: Does the combination of charms provide idempotent hooks, clean configuration, and upgrades that are effective and data-safe?

• Innovative Design: Does the charm separate installation logic from relation logic in a way that provides seamless scalablity, upgradability, etc?

• Novelty: Does the charm add to charm-helpers or do something in a way that hasn’t been done before?  Does it use Juju for something new and exciting?

• Responsiveness: a review is necessary to getting the charm into the contest, so submit early and respond often! Failure to respond to feedback may jeopardise your chances of winning.

SOURCE: juju.ubuntu.com