Cloud Resume Challenge - Part 1: The Challenge Explained

A Cloud Project to Advance Your Career!

The Cloud Resume Challenge was created by Forrest Brazeal as a way to as a way to advance your career, but beyond that it’s simply a fun way to level up your cloud skills. Forrest first presented the challenge with a deadline of July 21, 2020 to complete it. As Forrest put it, he has a large network of connections and he would be willing to help where he could via shout-outs and referrals for those who completed it. The caveat of course was that you followed the strict Cloud Resume Challenge requirements which are as follows:

Certification - Your resume needs to have at minimum the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification on it.
HTML - Your resume needs to be written in HTML. Not a Word doc, not a PDF.
CSS - Your resume needs to be styled with CSS.
Static S3 Website - Your HTML resume should be deployed online as an Amazon S3 static website.
HTTPS - The S3 website URL should use HTTPS for security. You will need to use Amazon CloudFront to help with this.
DNS - Need a custom DNS domain name to the CloudFront distribution, so your resume can be accessed at something like my-c00l-resume-website.com. You can use Amazon Route53.
Javascript - Your resume webpage should include a visitor counter that displays how many people have accessed the site.
Database - The visitor counter will need to retrieve and update its count in a database somewhere. I suggest you use Amazon’s DynamoDB for this. (
API - Use API Gateway and Lambda to communicate directly with DynamoDB from your Javascript code.
Python - You will need to write Python code in the Lambda function; – a common language used in back-end programs and scripts – and its boto3 library for AWS.
Tests - You should also include some tests for your Python code. Here are some resources on writing good Python tests.
Infrastructure as Code - Define your resources (DynamoDB table, the API Gateway, the Lambda function) using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) and deploy them using the AWS SAM CLI.
Source Control - Your back-end API and your front-end website should update automatically whenever you make a change to the code via CI/CD and a private GitHub.
CI/CD (Back end) - Set up GitHub Actions such that when you push an update to your Serverless Application Model template or Python code, your Python tests get run.
CI/CD (Front end) - Create a second private GitHub repository for your website code. Create GitHub Actions such that when you push new website code, the S3 bucket automatically gets updated.
Blog post - Finally, write a short blog post describing some things you learned while working on this project.