Netflix has over the years become one of the absolute best engineering powerhouses for building cloud-native applications. At AWS we are very proud to be their infrastructure partner and every day we learn from how they use our cloud services. Many of the observations I talk about in my “21st Century Application Architectures” presentation come from seeing Netflix architects at work.

Netflix has gone beyond just building great applications; they have made fundamental pieces of their cloud platform available as open source and many in the industry have responded to that with great enthusiasm, evidenced by the packed Netflix House in February where people came to hear more about NetflixOSS.

But Netflix has even gone a step beyond this by sponsoring a contest for the best open source contributions to the NetflixOSS platform. The Netflix OSS Cloud Prize carries a cash reward of $100K distributed over 10 categories. Each of the category winners will also receive $5K worth of AWS credits. The contest will run through September 15 2013 after which a Judging Panel, which I am excited to be part of, will pick the winners. The winner will be announced on October 16 and the trophies will be presented at the AWS Re: Invent conference in November in Las Vegas.

The ten categories are:

1. Best example application mash-up
2. Best new monkey
3. Best contribution to code quality
4. Best new feature
5. Best contribution to operational tools, availability and manageability
6. Best portability enhancement
7. Best contribution to performance improvements
8. Best datastore integration
9. Best usability enhancement
10. Judges choice award

For more details check out the documentation wiki of the Cloud Prize node on GitHub.

Then go fork the repo and start building! I am very much looking forward to the results.