How I Built a Serverless Resume on AWS (Cloud Resume Challenge Project)

# How I Built a Serverless Resume on AWS (The Cloud Resume Challenge)

The Cloud Resume Challenge is a practical way to move beyond tutorials and build a real, production-style cloud project. It forces you to design, deploy, and connect multiple AWS services into a working system.

This post breaks down the architecture, implementation, and key issues I ran into while building a fully serverless resume website on AWS.

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## 🏗️ Architecture

The system is fully serverless and designed for low cost and scalability:

S3 (Frontend) → CloudFront → API Gateway → Lambda → DynamoDB

### Components

1. **Frontend (S3)**
   - Static resume site built with HTML/CSS
   - Hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket

2. **CDN (CloudFront)**
   - Distributes content globally
   - Provides HTTPS and caching for performance

3. **Database (DynamoDB)**
   - Stores a single visitor counter item
   - Enables persistent, atomic updates

4. **Backend (Lambda)**
   - Python function using `boto3`
   - Reads, increments, and returns visitor count

5. **API Layer (API Gateway)**
   - Exposes `/getcount` endpoint
   - Connects frontend requests to Lambda

6. **CI/CD (GitHub Actions)**
   - Automatically deploys frontend updates to S3
   - Invalidates CloudFront cache after deployment

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## 🧠 What I Learned / Challenges

### 1. CORS Configuration Issues
The browser initially blocked API requests due to CORS restrictions.

**Fix:**
Configured API Gateway to allow:
- Origins
- Methods (`GET`, `OPTIONS`)
- Headers

This allowed the frontend to securely call the backend API.

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### 2. Git History Conflicts
Changes made locally and via GitHub web editor caused non-fast-forward errors.

**Fix:**
```bash
git pull origin main --rebase

This aligned commit history and resolved the conflict cleanly.

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3. CloudFront Caching Delays

Frontend updates were not visible immediately due to cached CloudFront content.

Fix:
Added a GitHub Actions step:

aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id <ID> --paths "/*"

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💡 Key Takeaways

• IAM least-privilege design

  • Lambda only accesses required DynamoDB resources

• Serverless architecture design

  • No servers to manage, only managed services

• Frontend-backend integration

  • Static site enhanced using API calls

• Automation-first mindset

  • Deployments handled entirely through CI/CD pipelines

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🔗 Project Links

• 🌐 Live Website: https://d1l6jcvu4zf64q.cloudfront.net/
• ⚙️ API Endpoint: https://25ktpno81j.execute-api.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com/getcount
• 💻 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/waisyrr/cloud-resum

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📌 Closing

This project demonstrates how multiple AWS services can be combined into a simple but production-style serverless application. It was less about building a resume site and more about learning how real cloud systems are structured.