A few weeks ago, I came across the cloud resume challenge which piqued my interest and I decided to partake in it. The challenge was initiated by Forrest Brazeal and offers junior/early cloud career professionals as well as beginners an avenue to showcase their resume as a website built on their preferred major cloud provider using the requisite cloud products. The architectural diagram of my solution is depicted here
The first task in the challenge came with a requirement to have get at least the introductory Google Cloud Digital Leader certification. I had originally started learning cloud technologies in 2020 and got the GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Certification a year ago. With this under my belt, I had met the entry requirements and felt confident in my skills so I got to building.
For the front end, the resume was meant to be designed using HTML and CSS. While I consider my HTML and CSS skills to be decent and above average, I opted to download a template off the internet which I then customized.
Hosting the static website required that I create a Google Cloud Storage bucket and set the necessary permissions to enable object access from all users.
For security, the Load balancer was used to configure HTTPS, with the bucket created earlier serving as the backend bucket. Cloud CDN was enabled to cache the website. My domain was purchased from an independent vendor, which means I had to log on to the domain name provider's platform to point the load balancer endpoint to my domain name.
Having not used Cloud Firestore before now, I had to go read up on the documentation and found it quite easy to set up using Python. The javascript code for the website counter communicated with Firestore using Cloud Functions based on HTTP triggers. Every time the website was visited, a HTTP event would fire, causing the cloud function to retrieve the current visitor count from Datastore, increment and return the updated value to the site visitor.
Cloud Deployment Manager which is native to Google Cloud was used to automate the infrastructure deployment for this project. For version control, I used Github and created two different repos - one for the front end and another for the backend. Cloud build was used to set up continuous deployment triggers for the website and the infrastructure after any code updates.
This challenge was a great learning experience for me and I feel really glad that I took part in it. Now that it is over I would be moving on to attempt it on Microsoft Azure. I have been studying for the Azure Solutions Architect Expert cert and would attempt this again when I feel ready to take the exam
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