Easy as Pie Serverless Hackathon

Over the past year, serverless application development has seen tremendous interest.  The number of opportunities that show up on job boards showcase how critical this skill has become. It's not surprising that at Google, we have seen the use of Serverless products increase by 4X over the past year. Particularly, as developers have moved away from  monolithic, slow-moving applications toward more distributed, event-based, serverless applications. Infact, more and more companies are looking for candidates experienced in Google Cloud serverless tools thanks to its ease of use, portability, and security benefits. 

Software, like cooking, is best learned by getting your hands dirty. And what better way to learn these skills in demand than by building something new. This is precisely why we are launching “Easy as Pie Serverless Hackathon”. It is a perfect opportunity for you to kick the tires and work closely with the Google team to gain serverless skills in action. Not just that, there are three challenges to choose from, with $20,000 USD in cash prizes divided among the top submissions. Submissions are evaluated on their technical execution, completeness, and return on investment. 

In addition to cash prizes, you will be the first to access new products like Cloud Functions (2nd gen). Cloud Functions (2nd gen) comes with new capabilities, such as concurrency (up to 1,000 concurrent requests per function instance), larger instances (816 GB memory and 24 vCPUs), longer processing time (up to 60 mins), minimum instances (prewarmed instances), and more. 

During the hackathon, you can combine Cloud Functions (2nd gen) or other serverless products with the rest of the Google Cloud platform and bring your ideas to life. For example, you could add sentiment analysis to your existing applications with our artificial intelligence APIs, or build powerful visualizations by connecting to our data analytics or machine learning APIs. As you build these applications, our developer tools will be with you along the way. You can use our Client Libraries to connect to our APIs with minimal code, deploy using our Cloud SDK CLI, or edit your code through the Cloud Code in-browser IDE.

Please submit projects by February 4, 2022. To qualify, your project must use one Google Cloud serverless product, which includes Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, or Workflows  and your project  must deploy and run. Please  submit a 3 to 5 minute video and a slide presentation detailing your use case. If you need help, you can tune in to workshops led by Google Cloud Product Managers and Engineers or complete our quickstarts at your own pace. 

We’re excited to see what you build. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how rapidly you will be able to build scalable production quality software at lightning speed with Google Cloud. Check out the hackathon website to enter and find additional contest details.