Many of you will be familiar with [Juju](https://juju.ubuntu.com/), the powerful cloud orchestration platform we have been building.
Ubuntu has become the most popular Operating System in the world for cloud deployments, and Juju brings a powerful orchestration platform with over 100 services ready to deploy. It enables you to build entire environments in the cloud with only a few commands on [public clouds](https://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/public-cloud) such as Amazon Web Services and HP Cloud, private clouds built with [OpenStack](https://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private-cloud/openstack), or raw bare metal via [Metal As a Service (MAAS)](https://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/orchestration/deployment).
If you haven’t seen and tried Juju, I strongly recommend you do so. It makes spinning up a service, relating different components (e.g WordPress and MySQL), and scaling up (such as when you get Slashdotted) quick and easy, but powerful enough for comprehensive production services.
Want to give it a try? [Click here to get started](https://juju.ubuntu.com/get-started/).
## The Juju Charm Championship
*Jorge Castro* on my team has been working over the last few years to grow our community of Juju charmers, running charm schools online and offline, coordinating tutorials, education weeks, and working with many different upstreams to help them harness Juju.
Recently we kicked off a particularly fun part of our community growth efforts in the form of the [Juju Charm Championship](https://github.com/juju/charm-championship).
The idea is simple:
1. Charm up the individual services in your infrastructure, make something that is cool and repeatable.
2. Put it together into a Juju bundle.
3. Submit your stack.
4. Win money…with over **$30,000** USD in prizes!
That’s right…cold hard cash for building an awesome charm.
Let’s talk more about the cash. There are basically three categories:
* **High Availability** – represents a full stack of HA-enabled services to accomplish a task.
* **Data Mining** – represents a full stack of data mining and “big data” analysis.
* **Monitoring** – represents a full stack of monitoring solutions for existing services.
The winner of each category will win **$10,000**. It doesn’t stop there though. In addition to these prizes, individual charm maintainers of a reviewed charm in the *reviewed* section of the Charm Store will receive **$200** if their charm is included in a winning template. This can be awarded multiple times, to a maximum total of **$3,000** per category.
## How To Enter
Entering is simple. Just head to [this page to get started](https://github.com/juju/charm-championship), which includes a full FAQ. If you need a tutorial for writing a charm, you can [find it here](https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/authors-charm-writing.html). If you have any further questions feel free to post to the [Juju mailing list](https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/juju) or ask in `#juju` on Freenode.
Be sure to get started soon though, the competition closes on **1st October 2013**!
