Competitor Info for Regional Championships 2023

This page provides you with specific information you need for competing at this regional championship. Please note that you can only participate by joining a hosted competition from your regional vocational school. The information provided here is about certain technical details and hints regarding the competition itself.

❗ General Information #

Thank you for competing at the regional championships 2023 in Cloud Computing, which is focused on measuring your technical skills regarding modern cloud infrastructure. You will have to register on our Swiss Cloud Skills platform to complete, where you get your own temporary AWS instance for completing the various tasks. This page will explain all the required steps for your onboarding and give you some additional information regarding the platform itself.

🚀 How to get started #

To start competing in this challenge, please follow these steps:

Navigate to the Swiss Cloud Skills platform, abbreviated as SCS. You will need to register your own account before you can compete. Please use an email address where you can still be reached several months after the competition.
After registering your own account at SCS, you are required to verify your email address. Please check your inbox and click on the link you received to activate your account, after which you may proceed with the next step.
Check out your own profile on SCS by clicking on User Profile in the main menu. Ensure that all fields are filled out, as these are required for the ranking. You can click on “Edit profile” to change any information as often as needed.
Now that you are logged in, click on Participations in the main menu of SCS. This will bring you to a new page, where you find a button called “Use invite code”. Press this button and enter the 8-digit alphanumeric code that has been provided to you by your local teacher.
After using the invite code, you should be automatically redirected to the respective competition. If this should not work for any reason, click on Participations again and then select the “Go to competition” button for the specific competition you are participating in.

You have now prepared all the required steps to compete in the regional championships 2023. Please continue reading along here to get more information about how the platform works as well as other useful hints.

📚 How to use the SCS platform #

The competition view #

The competition view is the initial view you are being presented with after joining a competition via an invite code. The page shows you the most important information about the actual competition itself as well as all available challenges for the specific competition:

While upcoming competitions might contain multiple independent challenges, e.g. to use them during a speed competition, the regional championships only contain a single challenge with a time limit of 180 minutes. After reading through the competition information, you should click on the challenge at the right hand side of the page to get to the challenge view, which is explained in the next section.

The challenge view #

The challenge view is the most important view for you as a competitor. It will provide you with all the information regarding the challenge you are currently tackling. As the regional championships 2023 only include a single challenge, you can stay on this view throughout the whole competition without having to navigate anywhere else.

When opening a challenge view for the first time, you will not see much information yet, as you have to start a challenge before you can actually work on solving it. To do so, press the Start Challenge button on the right hand side:

Challenge view before starting — View of a challenge in SCS before it has been started

After clicking on said button, you will once more be presented with the rules for the given challenge. Please ensure that you read them carefully before you attempt to continue. Once you familiarized yourself with the rules, tick the checkbox to agree to them, followed by clicking on the button Start Challenge.

Challenge rules before starting — Confirm dialog for rules when starting a new challenge

Once you confirmed the rules and requested to start the challenge, you might have to wait anywhere between a couple seconds and minutes for your instance to be provisioned. You do NOT have to refresh the page by yourself, as it will automatically refresh any information presented to you. Please wait for this process to complete and pay attention to the State field:

As soon as the challenge has been started and provisioned, your time limit will begin to count down. We highly advise you to keep on reading through this document before actually starting the challenge to not lose any time.

Once provisioned has been completed, the challenge will automatically start. You will now see all the information required to complete this challenge, along with the credentials for AWS, the ability to use hints and a feature which reveals your current score:

View of active challenge — View of currently active and running challenge

Here is an explanation of the various sections / cards which are being displayed on this page and what they are used for. Feel free to read those as needed, in case anything should not be clear by itself:

Challenge Description: This section contains all information about the challenge itself, specifically what you have to complete, how you have to do it, what you have to pay attention to and further information. It is unlocked after the challenge has been started and can be read at any time throughout the remainder of the challenge.
Hints: Here you can list all available hints for the active challenge, if any. Hints are grouped into categories, i.e. “Cloud Networking” and “Troubleshooting”, and are unlocked in order. Each hint has a certain cost associated with it, which will be deducted from your overall score. This means that while you can unlock as many hints as you want, you carefully have to consider their impact on your score. Once you unlocked a hint, you can view it as often as needed, without any further cost.
Credentials: This provides you with the ability to sign into your own temporary AWS account for actually solving the challenge. The Federate button shows you a modal which will automatically log you into the AWS Management Console. The Request button on the other hand will generate a temporary AWS session which you can use for the AWS CLI, should you prefer solving the challenge that way.
Status: Always keep a close eye on this section! It will tell you specifically how much time you have left to solve this challenge. Once your time expired, you will automatically be denied any further access to the AWS account. You will notice this by the fact that all further requests in the AWS Console are denied and resulting in errors.
Grading: Within this section you will always see your current score, along with a timestamp when it was last checked. You can click onto the View details button to open up a modal which lists all the criteria and your current progress with them.
Details: For informational purposes, this section once again displays the time limit and grading intervals of this challenge. Please note that the grading interval can slightly vary and might sometimes take longer to refresh.

You now have all the knowledge you need to work with the SCS platform. Good luck and we hope you enjoy the competition!

❓ Frequently asked questions #

Do I need to submit anything at the end of the competition? No, the platform is fully automated and has all the information required to complete the grading process. Your attempt will be graded at least one more time after your time expired, guaranteeing that all your actions, even last-minute ones, are properly counted.
Will I have to pay anything? Of course not! The costs of running this competition are covered for you and you can freely use the available resources as needed. Please refrain from deliberately trying to cause high resource costs though, as all the accumulated costs have to be paid by the team behind this competition.
Why am I seeing permission errors? While you have a certain freedom for solving the individual tasks and we rely on functional testing, the platform still imposes certain restrictions upon you, both for protecting the integrity of the challenge as well as avoiding the deployment of costly resources. Try looking for another way, as all tasks have been verified by our team and can be solved.
I faced technical issues and lost time, what can I do? Get in touch with your local teacher as soon as this happens. In case they feel a time extension is justified, let them know to use the emergency contact provided as part of their support description and continue working on your challenge while we communicate with your teacher.