Cloud resume challenge

Hello there reader,

Starting in September, I took on the Cloud Resume Challenge, which you can find at /aws/. This challenge has been quite the ride, expanding my experience with the cloud, especially in the world of AWS. In this blog, I'll break down what I've been up to in this challenge.

Creating the website.

The initial steps were all about creating a static website using HTML and CSS. To be honest, I'd never made a website before, so I went on a bit of a journey to learn about HTML and CSS. Luckily, I stumbled upon https://html5up.net/, a site that had great templates. It saved me a ton of time; I just had to tweak the text and add my own touch to the code.

After getting the website just right, it was time to get it up and running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). I used CloudFront to make the website accessible to users, S3 to store all the site's stuff (that's how it became a static website), and Route 53 to give my site its own personalized web address.

Let's add a counter.

Once my website was out there on the World Wide Web, I wanted to add a viewer counter to keep tabs on how many people were checking it out. To do this, I used DynamoDB with JavaScript. I set up a table in DynamoDB, and my JavaScript code would tap into it to update the counter every time someone viwed my website. I did hit a hiccup when I forgot to reference JS in the HTML, but I got that sorted out.

**Getting familiar with Terraform and creating a CI/CD back end.

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Next up, I had to get familiar with Terraform, a tool that lets you define your software's infrastructure with code. It took me a bit to get the hang of it, but once I did, it was smooth sailing. I whipped up a Python script to run in AWS Lambda for backend updates. I also got my hands dirty with some Python code for a test environment. Then came GitHub - I created a repository to make it easy to push updates to the backend. With Git Bash in the mix, I could connect the backend to the repo and push my code into the cloud for testing.

Updating the main branch.

This part was a bit more straightforward. I wanted to update the main branch, so I set up a fresh GitHub repo just for that. Then, I cooked up a YAML script to call on my S3 bucket. Now, instead of going through AWS every time, I could just do a commit to update the website.

Final step, Final thoughts.

Finally, the final step – writing this blog. It's been a challenge, but I've learned a ton about how different Amazon services can work together. With this project wrapped up, I'm ready to dive even deeper into the cloud and keep building on what I've learned.