The best way to get some attention for your DevOps platform and open source system is to put some money behind it. Ubuntu's Juju was designed to be a free and open source sandbox for develops can build and deploy Juju Charms (distilled apps recipes, as Ubuntu noted), and now there's a contest for Juju developers to strut their stuff and possibly win $10,000. That is, if they can develop the best Juju Charm.

According to Mark Baker of Canonical, the driving force behind Ubuntu, the Juju Charm Championship is open to individuals, teams, companies and organizations. After the deadline of Oct. 1, the panel of judges will award $10,000 cash prizes to the best "charmed" solutions across a variety of categories. In total, $30,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to the winning entries.

"If you haven't met Juju yet, now's the ideal time to dive in. Juju is a service orchestration tool, a simple way to build entire cloud environments, deploy scale and manage complex workloads using only a few commands. It takes all the knowledge of an application and wraps it up into a re-usable Juju charm, ready to be quickly deployed anywhere. And you can modify and combine charms to create a custom deployment that meets your needs," Baker wrote on the Canonical blog.

Developers (and any other interested parties) can track and enter Juju Charms via GitHub. The GitHub site also has the entire list of rules and breakdown of prizes.

Of course, the goal with this contest is to push Juju ahead in the DevOps world, not to mention increase the number of Charms available and bring some additional attention to Ubuntu development.

Qualifying participants will also be eligible for a joint marketing program with Canonical—a program that will include featured applications slots on ubuntu.com.