sp-howard / cloud-resume-back-end

Project Overview (TLDR Edition)

The Cloud Resume Challenge tasks its participants with creating a basic HTML version of their resume and hosting it on AWS using a variety of cloud services, focusing on serverless architecture. That infrastructure should then be converted to code and deployed using a CI/CD pipeline with integrated testing. Here’s a quick run-down of how I interpreted these prompts, and the technologies I used to accomplish each phase of the project:

Front-End

• Portfolio Website
  • Created using Hugo, a popular static site generator built on Google’s Go language.
  • Hugo Theme – Modified version of Hugo Profile
• Resume
  • HTML/CSS version of my resume, with download links to PDF and DOCX versions.
  • View Counter using JavaScript. See next section, “API”
• S3 – Hosts website, configured with “Public Access.” A second S3 bucket is used to redirect www traffic to the root domain.
• CloudFront – Caching, SSL certificate, and HTTP to HTTPS redirection.
• Route53 – A record aliases for CloudFront, API-Gateway endpoint, and S3 redirection bucket.
  • Domain name, stevenhoward.net, purchased from AWS.
  • Hosted Zone’s Name Servers applied to domain via Terraform.

API

• View Counter, just like those old Geocities / Angelfire pages! All I’m missing is a pixelated, spinning “Under Construction” GIF.
  • JavaScript linked at the bottom of the Resume page. On every page load, makes calls to…
  • API Gateway (with Cross Origin Resource Sharing headers), linked to…
  • Lambda function written in Python (boto3), which reads, increments, writes, and returns a number stored on a…
  • DynamoDB table, stores the view count number.

End-to-End Testing

• Cypress, a JavaScript testing framework that simulates the loading of a web page and clicking various elements. See “CI/CD” section for more details.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Terraform, the industry leader in provisioning infrastructure via code.
  • Deploys all back-end infrastructure, including S3, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, Route53, Certificate Manager, and CloudFront.
  • State stored in Terraform Cloud.

Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

• GitHub Actions
  • Back-End
    • Terraform – Applies all back-end infrastructure.
    • Cypress – Tests API reachability.
  • Front-End
    • Hugo – Builds static website.
    • AWS CLI – Copies website files to S3 bucket.
    • Cypress – Tests HTTP return code and BODY content.