Every now and then, we do something rather awesome. Like sponsoring a homelab giveaway. I truly love helping the Veeam Team come up with ideas for this type of program, and this iteration is no exception. We are giving away an ultimate home and cloud lab to end the year.
This time, however, we’re doing something a bit different. We’re not just giving away great hardware and software; but we’re also incorporating the cloud. This homelab giveaway promotion will include cloud credits for AWS or Azure; to really provide IT pros an opportunity to grow and modernize their skills. The grand prize is worth over USD $15,000 and includes $5,000 in cloud credits. This is some serious homelabbing!
I’m convinced effectively every IT pro has a homelab story that can be identified as being instrumental to growing in their current role or learning new skills to take a new role. This is the case for me in my personal IT journey, and when we look at what is the right way to approach this in 2020, the cloud has to be part of the strategy. That’s why the 2020 homelab promotion will not just include an awesome assortment of homelab equipment, but will also include AWS or Azure credits to incorporate the cloud.
I remember the first time we did a homelab giveaway, it was in-person at a VMworld and wow what a showing. Here is a view of that from a few years ago:
Since then, we learned a lot on how to give homelabs away. For one, maybe the winner already has parts of a homelab in place. Maybe they have a particular preference to a Veeam partner for their hardware. Maybe there is a preference for performance versus capacity in regard to storage. That’s why we adapted the giveway to not be so much of an in-person winning (though it does make an awesome photo opportunity) to instead being more of a personal shopper where we will get you the components for the homelab and have them shipped directly to you.
Inside of that shipment will be a great kit to learn and grow. If I were to purchase it today, it would have 2 HPE Servers, a shared storage system, NFR software from Veeam, VMware software, a Microsoft Visual Studio subscription, a healthy dose of cloud credits, and more. The good news is that there are going to be three winners. One will be a winner with a homelab and cloud credits, but there are going to be two other winners exclusively for cloud credits. The second place winner will get USD $10,000 in cloud credits and the third place winner will get USD $5,000 in cloud credits.
This is your opportunity to grow in your career and our opportunity to give back to the IT community. Go ahead and register for the promotion, but hurry up as it ends on December 31!