This article was created in partnership with Alibaba Cloud. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
As you may have seen, we’ve recently partnered with Alibaba Cloud to find the best tips and tutorials for making the most out of Alibaba Cloud Services, to celebrate the launch of our new Alibaba Cloud Services community forum (maybe we’re being biased here, but our SitePoint Community really is a great place to connect with other cool people, to share ideas, knowledge, ask questions and have a chat – we really encourage you to go check it out!)
During the competition we received some really great entries about a plethora of uses, ranging from deploying a VPN on Alibaba Cloud to creating your own forum with Alibaba Cloud ECS. We had a tough time choosing the best ones!
But alas, the winners had to be chosen and so our judges locked themselves into a windowless room for days on end to debate, argue, fight and deliberate on the entries, only emerging after they had decided on three winners (and probably because they got hungry).
So the winners of the competition were decided, and today we thought it’d be nice to introduce you to the people behind the tutorials.
In first place – András Magyar with his very well written and informative tutorial: Deploy a Laravel application to Alibaba Cloud Container Service using Docker. András is a student from Hungary who is interested in software development. Some recent, cool projects he’s worked on include developing a CMS software for a local news portal https://dbhir.hu/.
His winning entry was actually his first time trying out Alibaba Cloud and he seems pretty pleased with the experience: “I used containers on other cloud providers before, but on Alibaba Cloud, it was the first time and I am very satisfied with it… I think containers are very effective and flexible solutions, Alibaba Cloud offers great services that help developers who work with containers. I want to learn more about containers and gain more experience. I hope my article will be useful for others.”
In second place was Nhi Nam Ha with his entry: Building a Serverless REST API with Function Compute and MongoDB. Nhi Nam is a solution architect focusing on web applications and cloud computing. He’s been working in the IT industry for more than 10 years with experience in both government and private sectors. He’s currently at Fujitsu Australia as a Senior IT Consultant.
His entry was actually part of a wider project he is working on, which is to evaluate and compare cloud services from major providers on the market like AWS, Azure, GCP and Alibaba Cloud. Based on his work, Nhi Nam is quite familiar with Alibaba Cloud, noting that “I have been watching Alibaba Cloud for a while and [am] excited to see how the platform has evolved in the last few years. Its product suite now includes most of [the] key solutions and services which allows the company to efficiently compete with other key cloud service providers on the global market. However, the documentation and educational resources about the platform are not extensive enough and I see that Alibaba Cloud is seriously working on it through a series of promotional programs.”
And finally in third place was David Banham with Statically compiled Go on Alibaba Cloud Container Service. David is a software developer, entrepreneur and consultant that builds amazing things and helps his clients to do the same. He’s currently working on http://notbad.net.au/, an advocacy initiative that aims to provide a people-powered national broadband network speed monitoring system (it also conveniently provided the boilerplate for David’s entry into the Alibaba Cloud competition).
David’s been a “big user of containerisation since the early days of Docker. It’s a real game changer for making devops workflows more robust. [He’s] written a couple of open source PaaSes (think Heroku clones) but since Docker and Kubernetes have come along [he hasn’t] found the need for anything else. The fact that it’s largely vendor agnostic is wonderful”. This is also David’s first time using Alibaba Cloud services and he thinks it’s great to get more players in the space to propel the industry forward.
Congratulations to all of our winners. But as I mentioned above, it was very difficult to choose which deserved the prizes, so check out the full collection of entries here. And sign up to Alibaba Cloud to join the fun!
Angela PhungAngela was the Head of Content and Production at SitePoint. When not trying to build a new workflow process, she was also an editor and writer. The correct use of a semi-colon is a big thing for her.
