Charm Championship to be judged by industry leaders

As we approach the final month of the Juju Charm Championship, we’re excited to announce the panel of expert judges who will be reviewing submissions and selecting the winners for the competition’s six categories.

Canonical is proud to have such a prestigious list of judges. It’s a testament to the value Juju brings to cloud service orchestration. It’s also a rare opportunity to get your work in front of and considered by key industry thought leaders.

There is still time to register and submit your innovative solution for a chance to win.

Here is an overview of the judges for each category:

Media

Judging solutions that brings value to media content providers, distributors, and associated mass medium technologies.

Adrian Cockroft

Adrian Cockcroft is the director of architecture for the Cloud Systems team at Netflix. He is focused on availability, resilience, performance, and measurement of the Netflix cloud platform, and has presented at many conferences, including QCon San Francisco, Beijing and Tokyo. Adrian is also the author of several books whilst he was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems: “Sun Performance and Tuning”; “Resource Management”; and “Capacity Planning for Web Services”. From 2004-2007 he was a founding member of eBay Research Labs. He graduated with a BSc in Applied Physics from The City University, London.

Continuous Deployment

Judging solutions that allows startups to be immediately productive, continually launch new features, and scale effortlessly.

Eric Hammond

Eric builds technology and technology teams for early stage Internet startups. He’s been involved with a series of great startups including Citysearch.com, Stamps.com, Rent.com, ThisNext.com, and is currently helping to grow CampusExplorer.com.

Chad Fowler

Chad is an author, musician, developer (currently for 6Wunderkinder, in Berlin), speaker, teacher and learner. He started and co-organized a couple of Ruby-related conferences including The International Ruby Conference and RailsConf.

Simon Wardley

Simon is a strategist who combines significant levels of hands-on business, operational, technical and management expertise. He currently works as a researcher for the CSC Leading Edge Forum – global research and thought leadership community. He’s also an advisor to companies and Governments on competition. Simon regularly speaks at events worldwide and is an advisory board member for a number of Silicon Valley based start-ups.

Data Science

Judging solutions that represent a full stack of data mining and “big data” analysis.

Pete Warden

Pete is an engineer and CTO of Jetpac Inc. He is also the author of The Public Data Handbook and The Big Data Glossary for O’Reilly. He’s built OpenHeatMap and the Data Science Toolkit, as well as other open source projects.

Mark Mims

Mark has a Ph.D. in Physics for research in Quantum Computation. His passion lies in data plumbing – where data science meets the real world of DevOps and infrastructure engineering. He is currently employed by Canonical, building DevOps tools for Ubuntu Server and helping others to use these tools to architect and manage their infrastructure. Most of his career has been in data science, both in the enterprise and as an entrepreneur.

Telco

Judging solutions that brings value to telecommunications service providers and telecommunications infrastructure.

Alan Quayle

Alan has built an established and respected international consulting practice, leading organisations in the creation of new businesses and services in the telecommunications industry. His career began at BT where he led a team that developed one of the first video on demand demonstrations over DSL. He has led projects at Lucent Technologies and founded Teltier which was acquired by Cisco. His capabilities span the development lifecycle from ‘bleeding edge’ technology evaluation and new venture development to market analysis of commercial services and solutions.

High Availability

Judging solutions that represent a full stack of HA-enabled services to accomplish a task.

Florian Haas

Florian is the co-founder of Hastexo and a key contributor to the open-source high availability community. He maintains the Linux-HA User’s Guide and other technical documentation, and was the original author of the DRBD User’s Guide. Florian has spoken at LinuxCon, linux.conf.au, LinuxTag, the MySQL User’s Conference & Expo, and many other conferences and events.

James Page

James Page is an Ubuntu Core Developer, Debian Developer and long term
Java and C++ Developer. He has been an evangelist of Free Software for the last decade, driving free and open source software adoption within a major UK bank. In 2010, James became involved in Ubuntu and has helped drive test automation in Ubuntu distribution over the last two years. His focus is on ensuring the quality of OpenStack on Ubuntu, with a specific focus on virtualised storage and networking solutions. James works for Canonical as Technical Lead of the Ubuntu Server Team.

Monitoring

Judging Juju solutions that represent a full stack of monitoring solutions for existing services.

John Vincent

John is “the mixed-up chameleon of IT Operations”. His code lives on Github.

There you have it – an exciting mix of industry experts looking forward to seeing what ideas and developments you can come up with!

As a reminder to all contestants, don’t forget to read the judgement criteria that the luminaries will be grading and evaluating your bundles on. Remember, each category has a $10,000 cash prize attached to it – that’s $60,000 up for grabs – and there is still plenty of time to get started. Follow the six steps below for your chance to win in six categories…

1. Register (essential for contest entry)

2. Install and configure Juju to use on your cloud of choice (AWS, HP Cloud, or your own OpenStack).

3. Deploy the Juju GUI in your cloud to model your deployment.

4. Assemble your infrastructure in the GUI using the available Juju Charms.

5. Export your bundle from the Juju GUI with “Shift-D”. The YAML file is your submission to the contest.

6. Fork the Github project for the contest, and submit a pull request with the YAML file.

After the competition closes on 22nd October, the entries will be tested in various cloud environments to make sure they work. The judges will then deliberate to choose the winners in each category.

For further information, or to simply review your initial idea for early feedback please get in touch with jorge@ubuntu.com. You can also join us on a Google Hangout taking place in the next couple of weeks to pick up some further insights.

Good luck!