The #CloudResumeChallenge

Information Overload

During the “lock-downtime”, I made up my mind to get back to doing more technical work, especially in cloud technologies where I had the least experience. This eventually lead to mostly researching about various cloud services S3, EC2, Lambda, Cloud Run, tons of tools like Docker, Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD and the list went on and on.

With so much resources and a vast playground of different focus areas, I was truly confused where one would even start such a journey, especially for a new tech/dev.

Stroke of Clarity

Scrolling through my Twitter feed one day, this thread from Forrest Brazeal pops up. A #CloudResumeChallenge which outlined a well thought out series of steps one could follow to figure out how things actually worked on the promised land of cloud native.

I’ll be making an attempt on this challenge for the purpose of learning and sharing my experience with you all. I think it’s important to try and skill-up whenever free time presents itself. Being able to pivot and adapt to this ’new normal’ is going to be a huge advantage.

There’s also the completion of certified exam for AWS Cloud Practitioner. Having a certification would be a bonus point get you in through the stack of applicants.

How do I plan to do this?

Reading more into the article, I decided to break it to phases. I’ll be posting about my work at each phase as they progress.

Phase 1: Build a resume webpage

Getting your resume into a single webpage.

Phase 2: Hosting it on AWS

Hosting the webpage on AWS S3, along with HTTPS using Cloudfront and domain using Route53 (or any other provider).

Phase 3: Adding a visitor count feature

Introducing a visitor count feature. Developing an API that connects the web page to the database.

Phase 4: Infra-as-code

Setup all the required AWS components using code or templates.

Phase 5: CI/CD Pipelines

Putting all your workflow a CI/CD pipeline so that once changes are commited from your dev machine, the code is automatically built, tested and deployed to the services defined earlier.

Endgame

What I really like about this is that it matches my personal learning goals, bit of development work, use of cloud services, managed databases, infrastructure as code practices, CI/CD pipelines and more.

And the icing on the cake is that if you complete the challenge, you may get to have your resume shared with Forrest’s professional network. And who knows… that may eventually land you a job interview. That’s a really generous thing one can offer during these trying times. Hats off to you, good sir!

Good luck to all that are on the challenge!