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FAQ
The Netflix Cloud Prize is all about making “the cloud” work better for everyone. We’re offering a total of US$100,000 (plus US$50,000 in AWS Credits and travel to AWS Re:Invent 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A.) for the best projects that improve the usability of the cloud.
While “cloud” has been a buzzword for some time, the technology really is still brand new. As our CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings said late last year at an Amazon Web Services event, the cloud is still in the “assembly language” stages of computing and there is a lot of work to be done for it to mature. The Netflix Cloud Prize is intended to encourage innovation and to help make the cloud better for everyone.
Video of Reed’s comments at AWS re:Invent Note: Assembly language is one of the earliest computer programming languages, dating back to 1949
The total cash prize is US$100,000. We have created ten categories with a US$10,000 cash prize per category.
The Netflix Cloud Prize should help advance the state of the cloud and move it from a buzzword to more generally accepted technology and advance the understanding of what it takes to build applications for the cloud and to use the cloud.
For example, a common misperception when it comes to cloud usage is that organizations can forklift their IT systems from traditional data center into the cloud. While technically possible, this approach doesn’t take advantage of many of the benefits the cloud can actually offer such as scalability and utility. The judges in the Netflix Cloud Prize competition will be looking to help advance building for the cloud, what we call “cloud native” applications.
We picked categories based on the biggest needs as well as based on work we have already done in the cloud. The categories and brief descriptions are summarized on this page.
Anyone or any team of people interested in cloud development. (We do have to exclude people from countries on the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control’s list of embargoed countries for which we cannot provide economic assistance.). Current or former Netflix employees, and employees of Amazon Web Services are also not eligible.
Six months. We launched the competition on March 13 and will determine winners in September 2013. The winners will be announced in October.
We have a jury of cloud experts who will judge the work.
Information about the judges is available on this page.
Yes, provided they’re not from countries that the US government restricts.
We host all our open source projects on github.com as do many other developers, so it was natural to build the cloud prize itself using GitHub.
We wanted a simple way to collect email addresses, but most GitHub accounts don't publish email for their owners and there is no way to send a message to a GitHub member directly. MailChimp provides a service that verifies the email address and supports global signup, then lets us send emails to the Contestants.
The mailing address is optional, however for local Contestants we will give advance notice of NetflixOSS Meetings held at Netflix in Los Gatos, California. We may also decide to send cool stuff to Contestants who are making good progress, so we wanted a way for them to provide a place to send it.
We are cloud pioneers. We started migrating to the cloud back in 2009 and the entire Netflix streaming service runs there. Everything you see when you’re browsing Netflix on any device is delivered from the cloud. We also use the cloud for Netflix features like the bookmarks that remember where you are in a certain TV show or movie. The US specific Netflix DVD service still runs in our datacenter.
(Note: We don’t actually stream video from the cloud, the TV shows and movies are stored in a so-called content delivery network (CDN), a globally distributed network of servers to ensure the best possible streaming experience.)
We use Amazon Web Services as our cloud technology provider. Amazon today is the biggest and most advanced provider of cloud services. Still, we have had to build a lot of technology on top of Amazon Web Services to make it work as a platform for Netflix, and that platform is what we are sharing as open source. Netflix has led the way in adopting “the cloud” and we have shaped the Amazon Web Services products into something that now provides more than 33 million people streaming entertainment.
We’re laying railroad tracks for cloud adoption and usage.
We have a great relationship with Amazon Web Services, which is run as a separate business from Amazon retail or other Amazon properties.
By open sourcing our NetflixOSS platform we’re making it much easier for others to follow us and use the cloud in similar ways. We call this laying railroad tracks for cloud adoption and usage.
We have built a set of tools that make the basic AWS service usable for any enterprise. We’re sharing these tools freely as open source projects and have seen increasing adoption by companies such as Intel and even the Obama election campaign.
We’ve published more than twenty components, tools, libraries and will be publishing more over the year, including a simple way to deploy all our tools in a platform like manner.
Besides there being a prize and Netflix being the one that awards it, there’s no similarity. The earlier Netflix Prize was focused on improving our recommendation algorithm, not related to the cloud.