Kicking Off the DevOps Journey 🚀
I’m officially diving into a 30-Day DevOps Challenge, and I couldn’t be more excited! The goal? Build hands-on cloud skills while tackling real-world projects. And what better way to start than by creating something practical—a serverless weather dashboard that fetches live weather data and stores it in AWS S3?
The idea sounded simple at first:
👉 Fetch weather data from an API
👉 Store it somewhere
👉 Retrieve and display it later
But as I quickly learned, cloud projects always involve more than you expect—and that’s part of the fun. 😆
Step 1: Fetching Weather Data Like a Pro
Since I wanted to pull real-time weather updates, I decided to use the OpenWeather API. It’s a free (and super easy-to-use) service that provides weather details like temperature, humidity, and conditions for any city.
I grabbed my API key, made a request, and boom—instant weather data! 🌤️
At this point, I was feeling good. Step 1? Done. ✅
Step 2: Where Do I Store This Data? 🤔
Here’s where AWS comes in. Instead of saving data to a local file, I wanted to store it in Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)—a scalable, cloud-based storage solution. This meant I could keep weather records over time and access them from anywhere.
But… AWS always has a way of humbling you.
🙃 Reality Check #1: Just uploading data to S3 wasn’t enough—I had to make sure my bucket was configured correctly to allow access.
🙃 Reality Check #2: AWS has strict security settings (which is good, but also frustrating when you just want something to work).
After some troubleshooting (and a few Google searches), I got my S3 bucket set up and successfully stored my first weather data file. Step 2? Done. ✅
Step 3: The Unexpected Challenge—S3 Permissions 🔐
This is where I hit my first real DevOps problem. Even though my data was in S3, I kept getting 403 Forbidden errors when trying to access it. Turns out, S3 buckets are private by default, and I needed to update my bucket policy to allow public read access.
I went into the AWS console, tweaked my settings, and… still got the same error. 😅
Cue troubleshooting mode:
✔️ Checked bucket policies
✔️ Disabled “Block Public Access” (the sneaky culprit)
✔️ Updated my object permissions
After a lot of trial and error, I finally got my data to be publicly accessible. Lesson learned: Security is a key part of cloud computing, and AWS doesn’t mess around.
What I Learned on Day 1
🎯 Cloud services are powerful, but security is always a factor
🎯 Permissions & access control take time to get right
🎯 DevOps is all about learning through problem-solving
By the end of Day 1, I had a working cloud setup—weather data being pulled from an API and stored in AWS S3.
This was just the beginning, but I already feel like I’m leveling up. 💪
See you on Day 2! 🚀
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