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March 15, 2013

Netflix Offers $100,000 in Prizes to Advance Cloud Computing

By Erin Harrison, Executive Editor, Cloud Computing

Netflix is offering $100,000 to developers that can help advance cloud computing. The Netflix Cloud Prize challenges developers to improve the features, usability, quality, reliability and security of cloud computing.

As cloud computing continues to emerge as a disruptive technology, there are new facets of cloud that have yet to be explored, according to Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix.

Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging,” Hunt said in a statement. “No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored, and developed. The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to attract and focus the attention of the most innovative minds to create the advances that will take cloud to the next level.”



A panel of experts will judge contest submissions and entries are open to the public. The entry period runs from March 13, 2013 to Sept. 15, 2013. Winners will be announced in October with prizes presented at the Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) re:Invent conference in November.

Image via Business Week

Netflix’s more than 33 million Netflix global members benefit from Netflix cloud technology, which enables features such as advanced personalization, mobile capabilities, social features and bookmarks that remember where members are in a show or movie. Netflix runs on a general purpose cloud platform, which is designed to make it easy to provide a reliable service for a rapidly growing global membership.

As Netflix migrated to the cloud, the company’s engineers created state of the art technologies which have since been shared freely with the general public as open source software, Hunt added.

“The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to improve understanding of what it takes to build native applications for the cloud that take full advantage of the opportunities for scalable computing,” he said.

The Netflix Cloud Prize is divided into 10 categories that offer a $10,000 prize each, judged by a panel technology experts including Amazon.com (News - Alert) Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Werner Vogels, Thoughtworks Chief Scientist Martin Fowler, Strategist Simon Wardley, Telx Senior Vice President and author of “Cloudonomics” Joe Weinman, University of Aarhus Developer Training Expert Aino Corry and Netflix Cloud Vice President Yury Izrailevsky.  




Edited by Rachel Ramsey
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