Undertaking the Cloud Resume Challenge: Part 1

When I began this challenge, I was already awash in the mayhem of AWS from some new work projects I had been assigned to, and my expectations for this were that it would be quite the headache to figure out. Honestly? The worst part of it so far has been getting out of my own way.

I took a couple weeks going through the AWS Cloud Practitioner training, making sure to take Thorough Notes (TM) so that I would be sure to have as good of an understanding as possible for the exam that was to follow. Then... I sat on it. Thinking to myself that it would be silly to make the cloud resume and have it hosted and NOT have the AWS CCP among my certifications, I put it off and tried to plan for when I could take the exam, etc. etc. At some point a week or two later, I decided to just look ahead and see what was next. Building the resume in HTML? Styling with CSS? Okay, that shouldn't be too bad. Maybe I can try to proceed with the rest and just update the resume after I have a chance to sit the exam, I figured.

Voila! Obstacle removed, progress resumed. I suppose sometimes it's good and necessary to remember that the majority of our obstacles aren't going to be technical, but that they tend to be conflicts between our own expectations and reality. With that behind me, putting together a copy of my resume and hosting it in AWS S3 was pretty straightforward. Sure, there was a lot of back-and-forth regarding fonts, but the process of creating the files and getting them uploaded to AWS was much simpler than I had anticipated.

From there, I went back to an old domain I had purchased a while back and was holding for project use (hence the name), and configured the appropriate DNS settings in Google Domains and Cloudfront. Getting the certificate established took a couple minutes - validation had a hiccup where AWS output their CNAME hostname with a trailing '.' and a duplication of the domain name, which Google was not happy about, but overall a quick fix to catch and adjust - and after that point the site forwarding was working more or less as I had hoped. No certificate errors, going to the URL sent you over to the appropriate handler in Cloudfront, etc. There is a bit of testing I need to do to make sure the domain name is preserved after forwarding (any advice here is more than welcome!), but it's off to a good start. Looking forward to tackling the JavaScript and DynamoDB elements soon!

///C