undecidedtech

software engineer

Cloud Resume Challenge

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About 6 months ago my brother in law heard me talking about my frustrations as a Frontend Developer and pitched me the Cloud Resume Challenge. At the time I didn’t really anticipate how this could be anything but just a WAY too beginner-level introduction to cloud hosting and I kinda brushed off his recommendation. I was very wrong.

On the surface, all the Cloud Resume Challenge seems chalked up to be is hosting a basic HTML/CSS/JS page on [insert cloud platform of your choice] and I’ve already been responsible for much more than this in my personal and professional projects. What the Cloud Resume Challenge really is, is a completely over-architected website that gives you a chance to really dive into some of the most essential Cloud services. I’ll be honest I’ve used configured/consumed most of the necessary AWS services at some point or another.

What I already had experience with in some capacity:

So I feel like it’s fair to say I wasn’t coming at this from a truly non-technical background. This is probably dragging on a bit, but I want to just drive this point home: The CloudResumeChallenge is absolutely a valuable experience for anyone beginner-intermediate level.

It took me about 5 weeks to finish, 3 weeks of studying for the AWS CCP-02 exam, and then another week and a half to finish the Resume Challenge component.

Cloud Practitioner Exam Prep

With regards to tips for anyone who comes across this, if you haven’t tried Spaced Repition, it’s never too late to start. I mostly just used Gemini-CLI to fetch the content of these AWS Cheatsheets and create markdown notes and Anki flashcards with multiple choice questions. This is a lot to introduce at once but I shared some of my notes and flashcards here: https://github.com/UndecidedTech/aws_ccp_cheatsheets I supplemented my studying with the practice exams from Exampro, which were definitely the most similar question set to the actual exam itself.

Resume Challenge

You can see my finished product on my resume page and my Repo

It’s worth noting that doing the Cloud Practitioner studying and exam is 100% a prerequisite for beginners, but earning the cert and gauging your Cloud knowledge doesn’t hurt for someone at a more advanced level. The Resume Challenge portion is not going to hold your hand and give you step by step instructions.

When I finally got around to doing the challenge, I took some liberty and just created a monorepo that holds the infra configuration and the frontend-backend code.

A monorepo is a single git repository that holds the source code for multiple applications/libraries, along with the tooling for them.

Here’s a look at my directory structure:

.
├── api
│   └── src
│       ├── handlers
│       │   └── bump-count
│       │       └── index.mjs
│       └── tests
│           ├── integration
│           └── unit
│               └── bump-count.test.js
├── main.tf
├── package.json
├── site
│   ├── css
│   │   └── style.css
│   └── index.html
├── terraform
│   ├── backend
│   │   ├── main.tf
│   │   ├── outputs.tf
│   │   ├── terraform.tf
│   │   ├── terraform.tfvars
│   │   └── variables.tf
│   └── frontend
│       ├── main.tf
│       ├── outputs.tf
│       ├── terraform.tf
│       ├── terraform.tfvars
│       └── variables.tf
├── terraform.tf
├── terraform.tfvars
└── variables.tf

It’s fairly straight forward, /site contains my frontend HTML/CSS that gets pushed to S3 and delivered by CloudFront. My backend, in /api, is a single handler that gets compressed and hosted on AWS Lambda and is triggered by a GET request in API Gateway. There is a single unit test that runs via Github actions that simulates DynamoDB and just evaluates that the usercount returns in the correct format and is iterated on. The “infrastructure as code” is just some Github actions and a terraform config that is smart enough to only redeploy the necessary services when frontend/backend sees changes.

What’s Next

I thought this was a good refresher for some fullstack skills I haven’t been keeping sharp as of late, but I really struggled with the Terraform portion, everything else I had exposure to plenty of times before. From here I plan on trying to get a Terraform Certificate and continue studying for the Solutions Architect Certificate from AWS concurrently.