Hi! I Just completed the Cloud Resume Challenge, the hard way I would say.
My Project Architecture Diagram
In this post, I share every failed attempt, every 'aha' moment, and the exact solutions that finally worked.
The journey:
Built a multi-account AWS Organization (to familiarize with enterprise-level architecture and cross-account permissions)
Failed with cross-account IAM roles ❌
Failed with S3 bucket policies ❌
Failed with ACLs ❌
Failed with S3 Access Grants ❌
Finally succeeded with S3 Access Points ✅
But wait... Still got Access Denied.
The plot twist? An old ACL setting from attempt #3 was silently overriding everything. One forgotten checkbox. Hours of debugging. Disabled ACLs → instantly worked.
What I built in 2 weeks:
- CloudFront + S3 static site with cross-account architecture
- Serverless API (Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB)
- Full Backend Terraform IaC + GitHub Actions CI/CD
- DNSSEC-enabled domain + Playwright testing
- Real-time visitor counter
Biggest lesson: "No error, no gain." Each failure taught me something documentation alone never could.
🌐 See the final product: https://portfolio.andyyaro.com
I documented the entire saga, including screenshots of every error message that haunted me:
📖 See Executive Summary (5 min read) on portfolio site : https://portfolio.andyyaro.com/the-cloud-resume-challenge
📖 Read Full technical deep-dive (21 min read) on my Blog page: blog.andyyaro.com/blog/a-two-week-journey-of-learning-and-building
What's your most memorable "Access Denied" story? Feel free to share !
Top comments (3)
man, those access denied errors always haunt me too - feels like the real aha moments come after hours of banging my head tbh. you think learning the hard way actually sticks more than just reading docs?
This is extremely impressive, I always end up fighting AWS permissions too so I feel this
Huge thanks to @forrestbrazeal for creating and sharing this challenge!