I've always been a fan of pipelines, automation and all this awesome stuff, but I had no idea there was a name for it. DevOps. It really changed my mind, and my career goals. I was constantly doing courses and looking for fun projects to do, but no one was satisfying me enough, they were either too simple or didn't fit my goal. That was until I found out about the Cloud Résumé Challenge. It is an amazing resource to learn and practice not only DevOps, by Cloud platforms (which itself are a part of DevOps). It is a very popular challenge, but I had no idea it existed, so I tried to give it a go!
The Challenge
I decided to try the challenge on AWS, since most of the jobs I could find require some knowledge of it. Maybe I can try Azure or GCP in the future for other projects, but AWS's free tier helped a lot with this decision.
Certification
I don't have the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification, but this was an amazing way to study for this certification, and I am for sure giving it a try after this.
HTML + CSS
I'm not a fan of web development, so I simply went to CodePen and searched some cool websites that I could use as a template. For me this worked fine since I have no intentions on doing anything front-end related, my focus is on DevOps, but, if you want to become a full-stack (even tho I don't consider DevOps a part of full-stack, some people do) developer, this is a essential step for you.
What I learned:
- Basic HTML and CSS
Static Website
Here's where the fun began, I had to make my (awesome) resume website available to everyone, and since it's a simple static page, it could drop it on an AWS S3 Bucket and call it a day. Obviously that required learning about policies, permissions and everything in between, but it was the easiest part.
What I learned:
- AWS S3 Buckets
- Static website hosting
- Basic AWS policies
- AWS Console and Terraform project structure
HTTPS
This was also really simple, as AWS CloudFront does all the heavy lifting for you, all I had to do was point my S3 Bucket to a CloudFront distribution and that's it! Obviously later on I would have to create a DNS certificate, but for now, simply hosting it on CloudFront would work. As I would discover later on the process, this would be one of the most important steps in this challenge.
What I learned:
- AWS CloudFront Distributions
- Terraform started getting more and more difficult. Took me a couple of days to make the IaaC for this work.
DNS
I got super proud of this (and also super frustrated), because my awesome resume could now be accessible via my own domain! This turned out trickier than expected, because I had to create custom DNS certificates, learn how domains work, CNAME, A registers, etc., etc. It was a difficult step, but the most awesome one.
What I learned:
- AWS Route 53
- DNS Domains and Certificates
Database
This was a tricky part, because I was trying to figure out how to deploy a MariaDB database with Terraform, and configure the table I needed. I searched a lot for answers, but turns out I was over-complicating things, and I could simply use AWS DynamoDB for it. At first, I was a bit skeptical of using a No-SQL database for a such a simple thing (I would only need 1 row of data), but the hardest part was just understanding how DynamoDB works. With that, I also had to learn about VPCs, since I don't want anyone having direct access to my database.
What I learned:
- AWS DynamoDB
- AWS VPCs
- NoSQL databases
API
There's no point in having a database that no one can access, so I had to make an API to call for the data I needed. The problem was, since I was hosting my website on an S3 Bucket, I could not create the API with the website, I had to make use of serverless functions (AWS Lambda). That (as everything in this challenge) was quite tricky, but it gets really simple when you get the hang of it, it's quite intuitive. I simply had to make one call to the database requesting the number of visitors, and that was it!
The next thing I had to do was connect this lambda function to an AWS API Gateway (which has a quite confusing dashboard) and I could access it anywhere! I stumbled upon some issue on that step, and had to learn about permissions and roles on AWS, since my lambda function was (at first) not being executed by the API.
What I learned:
- AWS Lambda
- Serverless functions
- REST API
- AWS API Gateway
- AWS roles and permissions
Visitors counter
Now, with the API ready, I could make my website display a number of visitors! But it wasn't that simple. Again, as I was hosting it on an S3 bucket, I had to do some shenanigans to make an API call that did not go over the internet (since S3 Buckets are a simple block storage and don't have any computational power).
My solution was adding the API Gateway to the same CloudFront distribution as the S3 Bucket, that way, I could access the API endpoint "locally" (like it was in a folder of the S3 Bucket).
The JavaScript part of it was super easy, simply make a call to that API and use it.
What I learned:
- How to combine AWS API Gateway with static websites hosted on AWS S3 Buckets
- Making API calls with JavaScript
Infrastructure as Code
It might be worth saying that, for the entire challenge, I was doing stuff with IaaC. Turns out that's not the best way of learning both Terraform and AWS at the same time, and if I were to do this again, I would first do everything manually, so I can learn it better, and then turn it into a IaaC project. Nonetheless, it was very fun seeing the Terraform building everything.
What I learned:
- Using Terraform to build AWS projects
- IaaC
CI/CD
This was by far the easiest part. As I was hosting my code on GitHub, I could use GitHub Actions to make a simple CI/CD pipeline so that every time that I update either the API or the website, it automatically updates everything, and I never (hopefully) have to do anything ever again!
What I learned:
- CI/CD
- GitHub Actions
The End
And with this blog post, I finish the challenge, and officially enter the Champions club!
This was a super fun and amazing project that helped me learn SO MUCH about AWS and DevOps. I hope doing more stuff like that in the future.
The final product: https://ldatb.com/
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