2016 Hello Cloud Challenge
Competition year
Active Dates (GMT):
Online Competition
Master cloud computing with Microsoft Azure and you could win $1,000!
Cloud computing is changing the technology industry. When you start looking for your first job, will you have the cloud on your résumé? You will if you compete in our new Hello Cloud Challenge! With Microsoft Azure, students can get a free subscription with no credit card required and start creating web apps, running databases, and much more.
Every month, one student will win our $1,000 sweepstakes. To compete, you just complete one or more of our Hello Cloud activities. Each activity you complete gives you another chance to win. And you only have to do each activity once – your name will still be in the sweepstakes month after month!
Register for our Hello Cloud contest today and you can get started!
So what are these activities? They’re actually kind of cool and doing them will help you learn how to manage and deploy projects in the cloud!
Click here for the Azure Machine Learning Activities: Four, Five
Activity One: Deploy a Web App
Click here for the activity walkthrough!
Check out our blog for a step-by-step tutorial on how to deploy a web app to Azure from Visual Studio Community 2015. You can use your own web app or just copy and paste our code from right here:
<!DOCTYPEhtml>
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello Cloud!</title>
<metacharset="utf-8"/>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello Cloud!</h1>
<p>Check out this sweet website I made in Visual Studio 2015!</p>
</body>
</html>
When you’re ready, copy your web app’s URL (it’ll look something like http://myhellocloud.azurewebsites.net/ ) and paste it into our Hello Cloud contest submission form available from your Imagine Cup Dashboard. For contest purposes, if we draw your name we’ll click your URL and verify you have a web app running there. That’s it!
Click here to go to the top of the page
Activity Two: Deploy a WordPress Website
Click here for the activity walkthrough!WordPress is a powerful and widely used tool for building and managing websites and blogs. It’s both free and open source, with a huge community of users worldwide. And with Microsoft Azure, you can deploy and configure your own WordPress website in minutes at no cost for students!
To deploy your own WordPress website, just check out our blog for the step-by-step process. When you’re done deploying and configuring your WordPress site, copy your web app’s URL (it’ll look something like http://mywordpresssite.azurewebsites.net/ ) and paste it into our Hello Cloud contest submission form available from your Imagine Cup Dashboard. For contest purposes, if we draw your name we’ll click your URL and verify you have a WordPress site running there. That’s it!
Click here to go to the top of the page
Activity Three: Deploy your Resume
When you start looking for your first job, will you have the cloud on your résumé? You will if you compete in our Hello Cloud Challenge! After completing activity three you will also have your résumé in the cloud!
- This activity builds on the skills of activity 1: Click here for the activity 1 walkthrough
- For the web page code you can create your own résumé format, or use the Hello Cloud Résumé Template
- Share as much information as you’re comfortable, or feel free to use your imagination
- Ensure that you that you create a new "Web App Name" for your résumé when publishing to Azure
- When you’re ready, copy your web app’s URL (it’ll look something like http://myhellocloud.azurewebsites.net/ ) and paste it into our Hello Cloud Activity 3 submission from your dashboard (please ensure its a different URL than Activity 1)
- For contest purposes, if we draw your name we’ll click your URL and verify you have a résumé hosted in the cloud. That’s it!
Click here to go to the top of the page
Azure Machine Learning Activities:
Follow the tutorial available in the lab PDF. The first four steps involve Azure Machine Learning, and the final two steps involve publishing the web app to Azure App Service. You will learn some basics about machine learning and can access links to additional content in the lab if you want to dig deeper.
Activity Four Steps – Azure Machine Learning Experiment
Follow the first four steps involving Azure Machine Learning in the tutorial. When you’re ready, publish your Azure Machine Learning experiment to the Cortana Analytics Gallery as an unlisted experiment. Copy the experiment URL and paste it into our Hello Cloud Activity 4 submission field from your dashboard.
Activity Five Steps – Azure Machine Learning Web App
Follow the last two steps involving Azure Machine Learning in the tutorial. When you’re ready, copy the web app URL and paste it into our Hello Cloud Activity 5 submission field from your dashboard.
Click here to go to the top of the page
More Activities Coming Soon
We’ll have more activities soon, including MySQL, Azure Machine Learning, and others. So get started with the above activities now and then keep on coming back to increase your chances to win!
When is the Deadline?
We will draw each month’s sweepstakes winner on the last Wednesday of the month. The deadline to get your activity URLs submitted to our Dashboard is the last Tuesday of each month at 2359 GMT that evening.
Once you’ve submitted, you’ll be in all future drawings for the duration of the contest. You can update your submission to add additional activity URLs whenever you want.
How do I get Microsoft Azure?
We’ve got a blog explaining exactly how to sign up. But if you’re already a DreamSpark.com member, just go straight there and get Azure right away!
Past Hello Cloud Winners
Congratulations to the monthly Hello Cloud drawing winners:
- September Winner: Alberto Chamorro Moreno, Spain
- October Winner: Jayashree Jain, India
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November Winner: Firas Mdimagh, Tunisia
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December Winner: Jozsef Kecskesi, Ireland
- January Winner: Jose Giori Herran Escobar, Colombia
- February Winner: Prabhath Mannapperuma, Sri Lanka
- March Winner: Attila Geiszt, Romania
- April Winner: Peng Zhang, China
- May Winner: Abdurrachman Mappuji, Indonesia
- June Winner: Jerson Otzoy, Guatemala