FAQs for the AWS MSP AI Hackathon
ELIGIBILITY & REGISTRATION
| Do I need to be an AWS MSP Partner to enter? | You must belong to an organization registered with the AWS Partner Network (APN) that has signed the APN Terms & Conditions. Provide your AWS Partner organization name and APN corporate email domain when you register. Holding the AWS MSP Program Validation is optional. |
| What are the key dates? | Submission and registration period: Nov 2, 2026 (7:00 am PT) to Dec 11, 2026 (12:00 pm PT). Judging Period: Jan 5, 2027 (9:00 am PT) to Jan 22, 2027 (5:00 pm PT). Winners announced on or around Jan 28, 2027 (2:00 pm PT). |
| Who is eligible to participate? | Individuals at least the age of majority where they live who are employed by, or authorized to act on behalf of, an organization registered with the AWS Partner Network (APN) that has signed the APN Terms & Conditions. Teams (all members registered with the same AWS Partner) and APN-registered organizations can also enter. |
| Which email address do I register with? | Use the corporate email address on the domain associated with your organization's APN registration, and provide your AWS Partner organization name. Your Devpost account email does not need to match your corporate email. Registration also asks for your country of residence and, optionally, your AWS SPMS ID. |
| How do teams and organizations enter? | A team or organization must appoint one Representative to register, submit and act on its behalf. The Representative must be eligible, and all team members must be registered with the same AWS Partner. The Representative receives any prize and shares it with the team or organization. |
| Can students or university-affiliated participants join? | Only if they are also employed by, or authorized to act on behalf of, an APN-registered organization. An educational affiliation alone does not make someone eligible. |
| Who cannot participate? | The Sponsor (AWS) and Administrator (Devpost) and other organizations involved in designing, producing, promoting or running the hackathon; their employees, representatives, agents and immediate family or household members; judges, and any company or individual that employs a judge; affiliates of these organizations; and anyone whose participation would create a real or apparent conflict of interest. |
| Which countries or regions are excluded? | Residents of, or organizations domiciled in, any place where U.S. or local law prohibits participating or receiving a prize, including Brazil, Quebec, Russia, Crimea, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, and any country comprehensively sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). |
| Can I participate if I live in (or am a citizen of) an excluded country? | Eligibility is based on where you live (or where your organization is domiciled), not citizenship. Residents of, and organizations domiciled in, the excluded or sanctioned places listed in the Official Rules are not eligible to participate or receive a prize. |
| Which AWS AI services qualify for the hackathon? | Your project must use at least one of: Amazon Bedrock (including Amazon Bedrock AgentCore), Strands Agents, Amazon Quick, Kiro, AWS Frontier Agents (such as AWS DevOps Agent, FinOps Agent, and AWS Security Agent), Amazon SageMaker AI, AWS Transform, Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Nova models. Other AWS AI/ML or generative AI services also count if they do real work in the solution, such as Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Guardrails, Flows and Agents, AWS Trainium, AWS Inferentia, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Textract, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Kendra. Common alternative names count too, for example Quick Suite, Strands SDK, AgentCore Runtime/Gateway/Memory, Kiro IDE/CLI, SageMaker and Q Developer. |
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
| Does my idea fit the theme, and which track should I choose? | Choose the track that best matches your project's main goal. Track 1, Run Your MSP Better: use AI to improve your internal operations with measurable gains (for example automated triage and self-healing, multi-agent incident response, AI-driven FinOps). Track 2, Deliver AI-Driven Outcomes for Customers: show differentiated AI-powered services for your end customers (for example customer-facing AI solutions, modernizing business applications with embedded AI, new managed AI offerings with recurring revenue). You must identify your track in the submission. |
| Can I submit more than one project? | Yes. You may submit more than one project, but each must be unique and substantially different from your other submissions, as determined by AWS and Devpost. Each submission selects one track. |
| Can I submit an existing solution? | Yes, as long as it was significantly updated. Explain in your text description, and in the submission form, what you updated. |
| What does not count as using a required AWS AI service? | Third-party or open-source models called directly instead of through Amazon Bedrock or Amazon SageMaker AI, and AWS services used only as general infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, databases) with no AWS AI service involved. |
| What does 'production ready' mean, and what is the HLD document? | The rules ask for a complete, production-ready solution rather than a proof of concept. To show this, include an Architecture Diagram and a High Level Design (HLD) document with your submission. The project must install and run consistently, and function as shown in your video and described in your text. |
| What is an architecture diagram? | A diagram showing how your solution's components and AWS services connect. It is required with every submission, together with the High Level Design (HLD) document. |
| What are the demo video requirements? | About 3 minutes; judges are not required to watch beyond 3 minutes. Upload it to YouTube, make it publicly visible, and paste the link into the submission form. The video must show the project working on the device it was built for, and must include footage of the internal accounts, including all upstream and downstream environments. Do not include third-party trademarks or copyrighted music or other material unless you have permission. All materials must be in English, or include an English translation. |
| Do I need a deployed project URL? | Yes. You must build a working, publicly hosted AI solution and include a link to it. It must be available free of charge and without restriction to the Sponsor, Devpost and judges until the Judging Period ends (Jan 22, 2027). If the site is private, put login credentials in the testing instructions. Judges are not required to test your project and may judge from your text description, images and video alone, so make those clear. |
| How do I submit my code repository? | Paste a GitHub or GitLab URL in the code repository field. It must contain all source code, assets and instructions needed to run the project. The repository must be private and shared with [email protected] and [email protected]. |
| Why was my repository flagged as inaccessible? | Screening could not open it: the URL was wrong, the repository was not shared with [email protected] and [email protected], or it had been removed. Fix the link or sharing settings and update your submission before the Submission Period ends. |
| Does my code need to call the required service, or is mentioning it enough? | The code must use an AWS AI service at runtime: imported and actually called (a library import, an app or backend entry point, or a loaded agent, flow or MCP config). Naming it only in the README does not count. |
| Who owns my project, and can I use open source or outside help? | You keep ownership of your submission. It must be your original work, solely owned by you, and must not violate anyone else's rights. You may use open source software if you follow its license and build on it, and may contract a third party for technical help if the submission is your own work and you own all rights. Third-party SDKs, APIs and data must be used within their terms. Projects must not have been developed with financial or preferential support from AWS or Devpost. AWS and Devpost may promote your submission and use your name and likeness for three years after the hackathon. |
| What language must my submission be in? | English. If your materials are in another language, provide an English translation of the demo video, text description, testing instructions and all other materials. |
| Can the deadline be extended, or can I edit my project after the deadline? | No. The Submission Period closes Dec 11, 2026 at 12:00 pm Pacific Time. You can save drafts and edit until then; afterwards you cannot change your submission. AWS and Devpost may permit limited changes only to remove material that may infringe a third-party right, discloses personal information, or is otherwise inappropriate. Upload your video early because processing can take time. |
CREDITS & TOOLS
| Do all AWS regions support the required tools? | Service availability varies by AWS Region and can change over time. Please use the official AWS documentation to determine whether there are availability gaps for the services you plan to use, and choose a region that supports all of them before you start building. If you have questions, ask in the Discord #hackathon-help forum (be sure to tag AWS MSP) or email [email protected]. |
| Are AWS credits available? | Yes, while supplies last: $200 in AWS Promotional Credits per team, applied to an AWS Partner AWS Account ID. Only individuals registered for the hackathon who demonstrate a valid submission idea can request them. A partner organization can have multiple teams, and each team can request one set of credits. Credits expire Dec 31, 2026 at 11:59pm PT, are not redeemable for cash, and can only be applied to AWS services. They apply to all products required to build in this hackathon. Charges beyond the credits are your responsibility, so monitor your usage. |
| Who qualifies for credits, and can I get more than one? | Registered participants who demonstrate a valid submission idea. Each team can receive one set of credits (one per AWS Account ID), and a partner can have multiple teams. Credits are first come, first served, and AWS and Devpost may decline requests without a valid submission idea. |
| How do I request cloud credits, and when will they arrive? | Complete the AWS Promo Credit request form and provide the last 4 digits of your AWS Account ID. You will receive an email with a code to redeem your credits. Allow about one week. You do not need to resubmit while waiting. |
| Do I need a credit card to participate? | You need an AWS account to provision resources and to request credits, because the credit request requires your AWS Account ID. An AWS account has a payment method on file; credits are applied against your usage, and any usage beyond the credits is billed to you. |
| Can AWS credits be used for Kiro? | Yes. AWS Promotional Credits apply to Kiro and to all products required to build in this hackathon. |
JUDGING & PRIZES
| Can I win multiple prizes? | No. Each project can win only one prize. The top three projects in each track are not eligible for the Special Prizes. |
| How are prizes distributed? | Prizes are paid to the individual Entrant, to the Representative for a Team, or to the Organization for an Organization entry. The Representative decides how to share the prize with team or organization members. Winners must complete a prize affidavit and any required tax forms (for example W-9 or W-8BEN) within 10 business days of receiving them; prizes are delivered within 60 days of Devpost or AWS receiving the completed forms. Winners are responsible for taxes and fees in their jurisdiction. Prizes are not transferable. |
| What are the judging criteria? | Stage 1 is pass/fail: the project must reasonably fit the theme and reasonably apply the required AWS AI services. Stage 2 scores eligible submissions on four equally weighted criteria (25% each): Technological Implementation, Design, Potential Impact, and Innovation/Idea. Ties are broken by the highest score on the first criterion listed, then the next, and finally a judge vote. |
| Who are the judges? | A panel selected by AWS. Judges may be AWS employees or third parties, may not all be listed on the Hackathon Website, and may change before or during the Judging Period. Judging may use expert panels, peer review, automated AI-driven analysis, or a combination, in one or more rounds. |
| Do I need to use more than one AWS AI service? | No, one is enough. Judges look more favorably on solutions that use services from more than one layer of the AWS generative AI stack (infrastructure, tools for models and agents, and applications), use each service for what it is designed to do, and connect the layers. Naming a service, using it as a simple pass-through, or using AWS only for hosting or as a model inference endpoint meets the requirement but is viewed less favorably. |
| What prizes are available? | Total prizes: $64,000. Each track has cash prizes: 1st place $10,000, 2nd place $7,000, 3rd place $5,000. Each track also has five Special Prizes, $2,000 each: Best Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Implementation, Best Amazon Bedrock Application, Best Amazon Quick Application, Best Strands SDK Implementation, and Best AWS Frontier Agents Application (DevOps Agent, Security Agent, FinOps Agent). Track winners also receive inclusion in the MSP AI Use Case Library (published reference architectures), priority consideration for AWS go-to-market support and partner marketing, and white-glove enablement for a potential AWS Marketplace listing (where applicable). Each project can win only one prize, and if a prize has no eligible submissions it is not awarded. |
| Will I receive a participation certificate? | No. Devpost does not issue participation certificates. Your submitted project page on Devpost serves as the record of your participation. |
NEED HELP?
| Where can I get help during the hackathon? |
DISCORD:
OR EMAIL:
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CREDIT REQUESTS: * All Credit requests go through the AWS Promo Credit Request Form, not Discord. |