Announcing the Alibaba Cloud Competition Winners

Originally published at: https://www.sitepoint.com/announcing-the-alibaba-cloud-competition-winners/

Judging the submissions wasn’t easy, due to a number of interesting entries. The criteria for judging submissions was outlined when the competition was announced. Among the things we considered were tech expertise, potential to be helpful to readers, and how well-written and easy to follow the entry was.

So with all that in mind, our first prize goes to @magyarandrasistvan - Deploy a Laravel application to Alibaba Cloud Container Service using Docker.

It is a comprehensive guide that demonstrates usage of several relevant technologies — Docker, Laravel, Apache, Redis, Git, and connects Alibaba Cloud Container Service, Container Registry, Alibaba's Virtual Private Cloud,and Resource Access Management.

The guide demonstrates the creation & use of clusters of ECS instances. Then it covers setting up ApsaraDB for Redis as a session database, and ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL. There are many workflow gems to pick up from the tutorial even for those who use things other than Laravel.

Overall a very solid and straightforward tutorial to follow. The author covers all the necessary steps in-depth, while keeping to the appropriate word length.

The first prize is well-deserved — the guide is relevant, thorough and complete.

The second prize goes to @foolishneo and his article Building a Serverless REST API with Function Compute and MongoDB. The article is a part of a series on serverless app architecture on Alibaba Cloud, and it covers several Alibaba products.

While it is not as technically in-depth as @magyarandrasistvan's tutorial, it does leverage Object Storage Service, Function Compute, and other Alibaba products to outline a workflow where we don't need to worry about the server stack details, and can focus on our business logic. Serverless apps are a hot topic among cloud providers, and this topic deserves more coverage. @foolishneo has written quite a good introduction to Alibaba products for serverless app architecture — and deserves credit, so much that we wish there were more awards to give.

And finally, third prize goes to @david369 and his guide Statically compiled Go on Alibaba Cloud Container Service.

The guide is a succinct tutorial on statically compiling a Go program, and using Docker to containerize and distribute it. This isn't a long guide and provides more of a conceptual overview of using containers, but it is a good starting point for advanced deployment workflows. Serious Go deployment scenarios can build on this guide.

There were other notable guides that deserve recognition (at the very least) - Create Your Own WordPress Site on AlibabaCloud by @maljuboori91, Create Your Own Forum with Alibaba ECS by @_alan, Setting up a Docker-based Gitlab Runner on Alibaba Cloud ECS by @idoko, Configure a MySQL master-slave replication on Alibaba ECS instances guide by @foolishneo, Install LEMP on Alibaba Cloud ECS by @igorrinkovec and others.

A special mention goes to user @domovik.vit for his useful submission, Issues I had to solve during deploying an MEAN app in Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service.