Juju Charm Championship expands with more categories, more prizes

The Charm Championship is underway, but there’s still plenty of time to get involved. Today we’re announcing the addition of three new entry categories, each with a $10,000 prize on offer for the most innovative bundle of charms.

The full list of categories is now as follows:

• NEW! Continuous deployment – a bundle of charms that allows startups to be immediately productive, continually launch new features, and scale effortlessly

• NEW! Media – a bundle of charms that brings value to media content providers, distributors, and associated mass medium technologies

• NEW! Telco – a bundle of charms that brings value to telecommunications service providers and telecommunications infrastructure

• High Availability – a bundle of charms for HA-enabled services to accomplish a task

• Data science/mining – a bundle of charms for data mining and “big data” analysis

• Monitoring – a bundle of charms that enables new monitoring solutions for existing services

What is the Charm Championship?

It’s a competition in which contestants use Juju, the service orchestration tool from Ubuntu, to wrap an application into a self-contained, reusable charm bundle — essentially a blueprint for how the services in an environment should connect together.

In each category, we’re looking for a charm bundle that really innovates, bringing simplicity and speed to an otherwise complex task. A high quality bundle will reflect best practices of services that run in production and solve “infrastructure gunk” and solve real world problems. The great thing about a charm bundle is that it can then be shared with the community and re-used anywhere, by anyone. That means the smallest start-up can benefit from the same easy deployment as the biggest companies. It’s out-of-the-box infrastructure deployment.

Here’s what a simple bundle looks like. In this example of a Rails application we’ve connected Logstash logging and Nagios monitoring to the application and added a PostgreSQL database.

This simple stack has other things it needs to be considered production ready. It needs a set of backup charms to ensure data reliability. It’s going to need load balancing, HA, and more redundancy in each layer of the stack. That’s what we want to see in entries:  a “magic formula” bundle that gets people most of the way there.

Prizes

Each winner will receive $10,000 and the chance to participate in a joint marketing campaign to promote their charmed solution to users. With 6 categories this means $60,000 in grand prizes to be won. In addition, charm maintainers whose charms are used in winning bundles can win $200 each time their charm is used in a winning bundle.

To give you time to take full advantage of the new categories, we’re extending the competition until 22nd October 2013. All the details are on Github.

Need help getting started?

Join us on #juju on Freenode or join us on the mailing list.

Also, don’t forget to register so we can contact you regarding important updates and to notify you if you are a lucky finalist!