Amazon is working with the German University – Freie Universitat on the Plat_Forms contest of this year which will focus on cloud computing and scalability. The German contest has been going on a yearly basis since 2007, and it is based on a set of given requirements rather than allowing programmers to participate with all kinds of applications! But they can use different technology platforms such as, Java EE, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby. Prizes include AWS credits from Amazon, apart from those provided by the contest itself.
The challenge includes a web-based application, with challenging Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements such as number of concurrent users it needs to support, guaranteed response times, fault tolerance, etc.
Read more – https://www.plat-forms.org/platforms-2012-announcement