🚀 AWS Cloud Resume Challenge – DevOps Edition

✨ Introduction

The AWS Cloud Resume Challenge is a hands-on project designed to build and demonstrate real-world cloud skills by creating and deploying a resume website. This blog will walk you through my implementation of the challenge with a modern DevOps approach including CI/CD, Terraform, AWS services, and more.

📌 Problem Statement

Create a live resume website hosted on AWS using various cloud services while automating the infrastructure and deployment pipelines.

🧠 High-Level Architecture

🧩 What Cloud Resume Challenge Requires

• A resume hosted on a public website

• HTTPS via SSL

• DNS management (Route 53 preferred)

• JavaScript visitor counter via API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB

• CI/CD pipelines

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

⚠️ My Approach vs Official Challenge

The challenge suggests managing the domain via Route 53, but I already owned a domain through GoDaddy. Hence, I chose to manage the DNS using GoDaddy itself. Not only was this practical, but it was also more cost-effective while still integrating well with AWS services.

🏗️ Infrastructure Setup with Terraform

I split the Terraform project into modular files inside a folder called backend-terraform/:

• lambda.tf – Defines the visitor count function.

• dynamodb.tf – Creates the visitorCounter table.

• api-gateway.tf – Defines the API endpoint.

• iam-role.tf – Sets the permissions.

• providers.tf and variables.tf – General config and inputs.

GitHub CI/CD Workflow:

• Uses terraform init, plan, and apply automatically.

• Conditionally imports existing resources to avoid duplication.

🎓 Tech Stack Used

• Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript

• Backend: AWS Lambda (Python), DynamoDB, API Gateway

• Hosting/CDN: S3, CloudFront

• DNS: GoDaddy (instead of Route 53)

• CI/CD: GitHub Actions

• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform

🌐 Frontend (Static Website Hosting)

The static frontend was written in HTML/CSS/JS and hosted on S3 with CloudFront for CDN and SSL support.

Visitor Counter: A JavaScript snippet calls the API Gateway which triggers a Lambda function to increment and retrieve visit counts from DynamoDB.

🔄 CI/CD for Frontend

A GitHub Actions workflow was created to:

• Sync code to S3 bucket on push

• Invalidate CloudFront cache (optional)

No manual steps required — push to GitHub, and it’s live! ⚡

🧪 Testing the Setup

✅ Visit www.ganeshinfo.life to view the live resume

✅ Check for HTTPS via CloudFront

✅ Check real-time visitor counter

✅ Test updates via GitHub push

🔍 Learnings & Takeaways

• Deep understanding of AWS services: S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway

• Practiced writing secure IAM roles and permissions

• Hands-on CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions

• Practical use of Terraform with real infrastructure

• Efficient domain management via GoDaddy (cost-saving move!)

✅ GitHub Repositories:

• Frontend: AWS-cloud-resume-challenge-frontend

• Backend: AWS-Cloud-Resume-Challenge-backend

💬 Final Thoughts

This challenge taught me how to architect, build, and ship cloud applications in a professional DevOps pipeline. It’s more than just a resume — it’s a real-world application that demonstrates multiple cloud-native skills.

💥 Want to collaborate or give feedback? Reach out on LinkedIn or check the GitHub repos!