Like many others, I recently took it upon myself to complete Forrest Brazeal’s cloud resume challenge: https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/aws/.
As someone who already had an AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification and worked on production cloud environments, I wanted to prove my skills and turn my personal website into something more complex. I was also excited because I get to own this project in its entirety, which can be rare in a corporate setting where I may only get to touch Lambdas or S3.
While it took months of chipping away before life and its distractions allowed me to finish, I always had it in the back of my mind. It just felt wrong to me to leave this project incomplete. The end result is deceptively complex, with a very basic looking web page that has a lot going on under the hood.
Having been scared to try out Terraform, I was pleasantly surprised at how simple it actually was to convert my infrastructure into code and automate any changes into AWS. The tutorials and documentation produced by HashiCorp, along with other users' blog posts made this my favorite chunk.
As far as extras, I did take it upon myself to enable DNSSEC, and triple checked that no AWS credentials were committed to code! Also, billing alerts are one of the most useful features in AWS as far as I'm concerned.
Really though, I just liked tinkering with all the techs that I came across and refreshing my memory on AWS services. I love having an easily accessible project that I made online and automation to make any changes easily deployed with tests to ensure it works. I'd encourage anyone with an interest in coding or web apps to give it a shot!
My site can be found here: https://kyle-miller.net
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