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Priyanka Vuddemari
Priyanka Vuddemari

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I'm Taking the Cloud Resume Challenge — Here's What It Is

#aws #devops #cloud #beginners

Hey everyone! 👋

I recently decided to take on the the Cloud Resume Challenge by Forrest Brazeal, and I decided to go for it. I'll be documenting my journey here week by week — the wins, the confusion, and everything in between.

But first, what even is this challenge?

What is the Cloud Resume Challenge?

The Cloud Resume Challenge is a hands-on project designed to help you build and demonstrate real cloud skills. Instead of just reading docs or watching tutorials, you actually build something a resume website and use a whole stack of cloud services to deploy and run it properly.

It was created by Forrest Brazeal, a cloud architect and AWS Community Hero, as a way to bridge the gap between "I passed a certification" and "I can actually build things on AWS."

What does the full challenge involve?

Here's the big picture of what you end up building by the end:

  • ☁️ A resume hosted as a static website on AWS S3
  • 🌍 Served globally via CloudFront (AWS's CDN)
  • 🔒 HTTPS enabled with an SSL certificate
  • 🌐 Accessible via a custom domain registered in Route 53
  • 👀 A visitor counter that tracks how many people view your resume
  • ⚡ The counter powered by AWS Lambda (serverless functions)
  • 🗄️ Visit count stored in DynamoDB (a NoSQL database)
  • 🔗 Everything connected through an API Gateway
  • 🧪 Tests written for your backend code
  • 🏗️ Infrastructure defined as code using AWS SAM
  • 🔄 A CI/CD pipeline so changes deploy automatically

Yeah — it's a lot. But that's the point. You touch almost every layer of a real cloud application.

Why am I doing this?

I was Test Automation Specialist and working as SRE for some time now and looking to level up my cloud skills. I work with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure daily, so understanding AWS deeply just makes sense for where I want to go.

Also, honestly building something real always beats studying in isolation.

What's Week 1 about:

Week 1 is all about the frontend — building the actual resume HTML page, pushing it to GitHub, hosting it on S3, setting up CloudFront, SSL, and a custom domain.

I'll be posting a full breakdown of what I built and what I learned very soon.

If you're thinking about taking on the challenge too do it don't think about it much

This is Post 1 of my Cloud Resume Challenge series. Follow along for weekly updates!

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