Ron Jackson

Cloud Resume Challenge

Building a cloud-native personal website — the full story and technical breakdown.

☁️ The Cloud Resume Challenge

An initiative by Forrest Brazeal to help cloud practitioners demonstrate real-world skills by building and deploying a resume as a live cloud application — not just another PDF.

What Is It?

Overview

The Cloud Resume Challenge is a multi-step hands-on project that takes you through building a complete cloud-hosted website using real AWS (or Azure/GCP) services. It's designed to bridge the gap between passing a certification exam and actually doing cloud work — demonstrating that you can build, deploy, secure, and monitor a live application.

This site is my Cloud Resume Challenge. Every page, every feature, is part of the deployment and architecture I built from scratch.

Challenge Steps

10 completed Step 10 next 5 remaining
01

Certification

Earn a cloud certification before starting.

02

HTML & CSS

Write resume in HTML, styled with CSS.

03

Static Website

Deploy site as a static S3 website.

04

HTTPS

Serve via HTTPS using CloudFront.

05

Custom DNS

Point ron-jackson.co.uk to CloudFront.

06

Visitor Counter

JavaScript counter backed by DynamoDB.

07

Database

DynamoDB stores visitor count.

08

API

API Gateway + Lambda to serve count.

09

Python Lambda

Lambda function written in Python.

10

Tests

Python tests written for Lambda function.

11

Infrastructure as Code

Infra defined in SAM / Terraform.

12

Source Control

Code version-controlled in GitHub.

13

CI/CD Backend

GitHub Actions deploys backend on push.

14

CI/CD Frontend

GitHub Actions deploys frontend on push.

15

Blog Post

Written a post documenting the journey.

Architecture

Current & Planned Architecture

This section tracks the architecture as the Cloud Resume Challenge progresses. Completed components are shown separately from later challenge stages.

Implemented so far

  • Frontend: HTML, CSS and JavaScript
  • Hosting: Static website hosted in Amazon S3
  • CDN / HTTPS: Amazon CloudFront
  • DNS: Custom domain configuration
  • Visitor counter: JavaScript frontend connected to a persistent AWS backend
  • Database: Amazon DynamoDB stores the persistent count
  • API: Amazon API Gateway exposes the visitor-count endpoint
  • Compute: AWS Lambda (Python) atomically increments and returns the count

Current stage

Visitor counter backend implemented and tested, and project source is now version-controlled in GitHub. Next stages focus on tests, Infrastructure as Code and deployment automation.

Planned later stages

  • Automated tests for the visitor-counter backend
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • CI/CD pipelines for backend and frontend deployments
  • Project blog post / retrospective
S3 CloudFront DNS DynamoDB API Gateway Lambda

Reflections

What I’m Learning

The Cloud Resume Challenge is an active project. Rather than presenting unfinished stages as completed, this page will be updated as each stage is implemented and tested.

  • Building and styling a responsive portfolio with HTML and CSS
  • Hosting a static site using AWS services
  • Configuring a custom domain and HTTPS delivery
  • Documenting changes as practical project evidence
  • Implemented a persistent visitor counter using DynamoDB, API Gateway and a Python Lambda function
  • Moved the Website Project source and engineering documentation into GitHub version control