The projects host a resume and portfolio on Amazon S3 as a static website. The site utilizes AWS CloudFront to serve the website using Amazon’s Global Network to reduce latency and optimize performance, and Amazon DynamoDB as the backend database layer of the application.
To automate to build process the solutions implement AWS Lambda, AWS API Gateway, and GitHub Actions to deploy updates and changes to the website. Additional the serverless components were launched using AWS SAM in order to showcase industry best practices of deploying resources programmitically and maintaining infrastructure as code.
The project was build in stages.
The most challenging aspect of the project was learning and familiarizing myself with new concepts and services in order to accomplish each component. Although some concepts with familiar, such as HTML, CSS, basic JavaScript, and using GitHub, others required learning new concepts and the corresponding AWS services used to implement them. Learning the foundations of NoSQL databases and Amazon DynamoDB. Learning API development and best practices before configuring Amazon API Gateway. Learning how infrastructure as code works, serverless application development, and creating deployments using AWS SAM.
Your resume needs to have the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification on it. This is an introductory certification that orients you on the industry-leading AWS cloud – if you have a more advanced AWS cert, that’s fine but not expected. No cheating: include the validation code on the resume. You can sit this exam online for $100 USD. If that cost is a dealbreaker for you, let me know and I’ll see if I can help. A Cloud Guru offers exam prep resources.
Your resume needs to be written in HTML. Not a Word doc, not a PDF. Here is an example of what I mean.
Your resume needs to be styled with CSS. No worries if you’re not a designer – neither am I. It doesn’t have to be fancy. But we need to see something other than raw HTML when we open the webpage.
Your HTML resume should be deployed online as an Amazon S3 static website. Services like Netlify and GitHub Pages are great and I would normally recommend them for personal static site deployments, but they make things a little too abstract for our purposes here. Use S3.
The S3 website URL should use HTTPS for security. You will need to use Amazon CloudFront to help with this.
Point 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 Route 53 or any other DNS provider for this. A domain name usually costs about ten bucks to register.
Your resume webpage should include a visitor counter that displays how many people have accessed the site. You will need to write a bit of Javascript to make this happen. Here is a helpful tutorial to get you started in the right direction.
The visitor counter will need to retrieve and update its count in a database somewhere. I suggest you use Amazon’s DynamoDB for this. (Use on-demand pricing for the database and you’ll pay essentially nothing, unless you store or retrieve much more data than this project requires.) Here is a great free course on DynamoDB.
Do not communicate directly with DynamoDB from your Javascript code. Instead, you will need to create an API that accepts requests from your web app and communicates with the database. I suggest using AWS’s API Gateway and Lambda services for this. They will be free or close to free for what we are doing.
You will need to write a bit of code in the Lambda function; you could use more Javascript, but it would be better for our purposes to explore Python – a common language used in back-end programs and scripts – and its boto3 library for AWS. Here is a good, free Python tutorial.
You should also include some tests for your Python code. Here are some resources on writing good Python tests.
You should not be configuring your API resources – the DynamoDB table, the API Gateway, the Lambda function – manually, by clicking around in the AWS console. Instead, define them in an AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) template and deploy them using the AWS SAM CLI. This is called “infrastructure as code” or IaC. It saves you time in the long run.
You do not want to be updating either your back-end API or your front-end website by making calls from your laptop, though. You want them to update automatically whenever you make a change to the code. (This is called continuous integration and deployment, or CI/CD.) Create a private GitHub repository for your backend code.
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. If the tests pass, the SAM application should get packaged and deployed to AWS.
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. (You may need to invalidate your CloudFront cache in the code as well.) Important note: DO NOT commit AWS credentials to source control! Bad hats will find them and use them against you!
Finally, in the text of your resume, you should link a short blog post describing some things you learned while working on this project. Dev.to is a great place to publish if you don’t have your own blog.
And that’s it. When you have done all this, add my GitHub username @forrestbrazeal as a collaborator on your repositories. If you need a job in the cloud, and you have met the conditions listed above, I will give you a personalized code review, then make as much noise about you as I can to anybody who will listen (including sharing your awesome blog post!).
