Netflix dishing out $100K in new cloud dev contest

Championing itself as a "cloud pioneer," Netflix wants to keep the ball rolling further and is doing so through a new developer contest.

The Netflix Cloud Prize contest is challenging developers worldwide to innovate and improve the quality and security of services delivered via the cloud.

The online video giant explained in the announcement that Netflix runs on a general purpose cloud platform, which makes it easier to scale and deliver the service as the company expands its global user base.

Following up its own cloud migration in 2009, Netflix touted that its engineers developed "state of the art technologies" that are now freely available as open source software.

While this contest offers a lot of potential for some lucky developers, it follows up the recent news that the Los Gatos, Calif.-based also made some significant cuts to its public API program.

Nevertheless, Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix, asserted in prepared remarks that 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."

Here's how the contest works. The Netflix Cloud Prize is divided into 10 categories, which will award a $10,000 prize to the winner of each category.

Those categories will be judged by a panel of some well-known and astute minds in enterprise technology, including Amazon's chief technology officer Werner Vogels, Telx senior vice president and author of Cloudonomics Joe Weinman, and Netflix Cloud vice president Yury Izrailevsky.

The entry period runs from today (March 13) through September 15. Winners will then be announced in October, and the cash awards will be handed out at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Re:Invent conference this November.

All winners will be invited to attend the conference in Las Vegas as guests of Netflix.