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

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

Technical Architecture

The stack powering this website:

  • Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript — hosted in AWS S3
  • CDN: Amazon CloudFront with ACM TLS certificate
  • DNS: Custom domain via Route 53
  • API: Amazon API Gateway (REST API)
  • Compute: AWS Lambda (Python 3.x)
  • Database: Amazon DynamoDB (visitor counter)
  • IaC: AWS SAM / Terraform
  • CI/CD: GitHub Actions (frontend & backend pipelines)
  • Version Control: GitHub
S3 CloudFront Route 53 API Gateway Lambda DynamoDB SAM GitHub Actions

Reflections

What I Learned

The Cloud Resume Challenge taught me more about real cloud architecture than any exam preparation course. Key takeaways:

  • How to wire together multiple AWS services into a working application
  • The importance of IaC — deploying manually once, then automating everything
  • How CORS works in practice and why it trips people up
  • Writing testable Python Lambda functions and running them in CI
  • The value of GitHub Actions for automating deployment pipelines

Get In Touch

Send Me a Message

Whether it's a job opportunity, a question, or just to say hello — I'd love to hear from you.

✅   Thanks for your message! I'll get back to you soon.

Prefer email? Reach me directly at jacksonr1978@gmail.com