It is hard these days to not walk past something which is connected to the Internet in some way. These things are everywhere – desks, pockets, wrists, walls, kitchens, vehicles, factories, traffic stops, grocery shops… the list goes on and on. These things perform useful operations, gather data, and most importantly have built-in connectivity. There are endless possibilities to what can be achieved when the data from these things is securely captured, processed, and analyzed using the processing power, availability, and intelligence of the cloud. We want to explore these possibilities, with YOU!

Which is why we are inviting you to participate in the Azure IoT on Serverless hackathon for your chance to win* a piece of the $20,000 prize pool.

This online competition will run over the next few months, is open to anyone who wants to participate. In addition to winning cash prizes, this competition gives you an opportunity to be featured on the Azure blog.

All ideas are welcome, whether you want to work on that sensors-driven smart-home project you have been putting off, build a remote monitoring solution for a healthcare facility, create an intelligent system to streamline the manufacturing process of your production plant, or even create a self-healing robot wearing cool sunglasses. This challenge is for you!

What about this serverless thing?

Using a serverless architecture is a great fit for Internet of Things projects, as it lets you focus on processing the data – no matter how variable the traffic – and generating insights from it, instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting that usually comes with infrastructure management for IoT backends. Add to this the integrations that Azure Functions or Logic Apps offers with other cloud services, and you have the quickest and cheapest way for building cloud-powered IoT applications.

Come and surprise us with your jaw dropping solution and explore the possibilities of going serverless on an IoT project while building it!

“Okay, I’m in…how do I join?”

You can go ahead and register for the online hackathon at https://azurehacks.devpost.com. Sign up for a free Azure account if you don’t already have a subscription, and start building your solution using IoT Hub and Azure Functions, as well as any other service, device or technology you might want to include.

New to Azure? New to serverless? Worry not! Check out this quick sample on how to capture data from your devices or sensors, perform aggregation, filtering or some other custom processing on this data, and store it on a database. In this sample you will set up the integration between IoT Hub and Azure Functions, learn a bit about triggers and bindings for Azure Functions, and understand how to drop your processed data on Cosmos DB.

Show me the money!

Besides providing a great hands-on learning opportunity for working with these services together, this hackathon offers great prizes for the top projects:

• $10,000 cash prize for the solution ranked 1st
• $6,000 cash prize for the solution ranked 2nd
• $3,000 cash prize for the solution ranked 3rd
• $1,000 cash prize for the popular choice solution, chosen via public voting

A panel of judges will review and evaluate all submissions and will select the winning solutions. This panel will consist of Microsoft experts in IoT, cloud computing, and serverless. The criteria will consist of the quality of the idea, its implementation, and the potential value for a production use. You can find all relevant details on the Hackathon website.

If the above is not enough motivation, we will also highlight the winning projects and developers on the Azure blog, so you have an opportunity to let the world know the cool things you are building.

Next steps

• Register for the competition on the Hackathon website.
• Learn how to process IoT Hub data through Azure Functions.
• Check out some examples of how to go Serverless for your IoT needs.

Keep an eye on the announcements we will have at the Microsoft Build conference next week, and start working on your solution right away!

Let the hack games begin!

 

*No purchase necessary. Open only to new and existing Devpost users who are the age of majority in their country. Game ends August 2, 2018 at 5:00 PM Eastern Time. For details, see Official Rules.