Persistent! (Storage): How the Cloud Resume Challenge Humbled and Empowered Me

I saw the Azure Cloud Resume Challenge as the ideal culmination of over two years spent studying Azure documentation, reading whitepapers, and earning certifications. It was the perfect opportunity to bring together a wide range of Azure services, and the structured guidance made it even more valuable. However, I wanted to approach the Azure Cloud Resume Challenge not just as a checklist of technical tasks, but as a discipline in iteration, troubleshooting, and persistence in more ways than one. A long process of getting things wrong until something randomly clicks into place. The initial drive for me to start this project was wanting to have a portfolio that was a neat and concrete demonstration of my experience working in the cloud, little did I know how much this project would grow my skills on its own!

The project spanned across the stack. I wrote my resume in HTML and React, hosted it on Azure Static Web Apps, and styled it with Tailwind CSS. I wired up a custom domain using Cloudflare DNS and routed www.brookkassa.com to my app with proper TLS/SSL and CNAME validation — And HTTPS, Yay!

Cosmos DB itself was a surprising highlight. Integrating it with my Function App taught me how to structure serverless logic to persist state, and I eventually had a durable, scalable visitor counter that updates in real time.

I had a blast with this, This challenge for me was all about those deeply satisfying moments of working in a full stack development and seeing it all come together. The small wins were aplenty: a successful GitHub action run. A “Succeeded” message in Azure Invocation logs. Watching infrastructure manifest in the portal from a few lines of Terraform. Each small win added to my momentum and I’m proud of how it looks!

If you’re curious, you can check out the live site at www.brookkassa.com and browse the full project repo here: github.com/brook-kassa/bkazure-resume

And if you’re someone preparing for certifications, I’d HIGHLY recommend considering the Cloud Resume Challenge to gain the practical experience.

This was a great exercise and I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned. Thanks Forrest!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/forrestbrazeal/
https://x.com/forrestbrazeal

Here’s a visual breakdown of the final architecture: