After numerous tabs open and tons of hours accumulated, I've finished the cloud resume challenge and wanted to share my experience. It took me less than a month and is a high learning experience.
Certification
I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and quickly passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate in November 2023.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Using a template, I build and configured my own resume website and styled it accordingly. I've done this kind of thing before, but I always found it fun to modify applications and see how interactive I can make it.
Host Static Website on S3
I created a bucket called sean-cloud-resume-challenge and configured it, so the bucket and objects are not public.
CoudFront and Route 53
Created a CloudFront Distribution that makes S3 website as HTTPS as well as a CloudFront Distribution URL with the origin to be my S3 bucket. I bought a domain from Route 53 and use that to configure the name of my website.
DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway for view counter
As I've done projects utilizing these services before, this part was not tricky and integrating these to be able to communicate with each other securely was straightforward. Lambda tells the API Gateway about the number of views from DynamoDB, and the API Gateway URL tells JavaScript. DynamoDB stores the number of views with a single digit ID.
Python Tests, Unit Tests
I configured Python tests in the Lambda console on AWS and the scripts were coded to check if Lambda function was able to communicate with DynamoDB to retrieve the number of views.
Serverless Application Model, IaC with Terraform
This was be far the trickiest part of the challenge as I haven't used utilized platforms such as SAM and Terraform. I ultimately chose Terraform because I was using guides on the internet. Terraform will to deploy my DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway as well as setting IAM role for Lambda to communicate with DynamoDB.
CI/CD for Frontend and Backend
I set up GitHub Actions for the frontend and backend to automate code and AWS resources to set them up. This was my first time utilizing Github Actions and it's incredibly simply to use. GitHub also allows you to store secrets for AWS Credentials so it's much safer and provides security.
Conclusion
The Cloud Resume Challenge greatly helped to improve my skills and knowledge on my cloud journey thus far and I'm much more confident to implement my skills in the future with the latest technologies.
If you need cloud experience and don't know where to start, I'd highly recommend giving this challenge a try. With the amount of researching, building, and testing you'll have to do, you're bound to gain significant improvement in your skills and knowledge.
Top comments (0)