Sign up for the Hello Cloud Challenge and you can 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!
Activity One: Deploy a Web app 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:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello Cloud!</title>
<meta charset="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 https://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!
Activity Two: Deploy a WordPress Website
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 https://mywordpresssite.azurewebsites.net/ ) and paste it into our Hello Cloud contest submission form available on 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!
More Activities Coming Soon
We’ll have more activities soon, including MySQL, Azure Machine Learning and others. So, get started with these two now and then keep 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!