Cloud Resume Challenge
By: Ajie Basuki
Introduction
Hello Everyone! My name is Ajie Basuki and Welcome to My Cloud Resume Challenge Blog Post. So to start, I am currently a senior at Loyola Marymount University majoring in Information systems and Business Analytics. To be honest with everyone, I have never had an interest in or any experience in anything related to programming or cloud computing. However, after my class in Networking and Cloud Computing, I realized that this is actually really fun! So after a semester of learning about Cloud Computing, I finally completed the Cloud Resume Challenge.
Purchasing My Domain
So to start this challenge, the first thing that I did was, purchase a domain name from NameCheap.com. Then, after I bought the domain, I also needed to connect the domain that we had just purchased to AWS. To do that, we created a hosted zone through Route 53 on AWS. After that, we were able to get information on the AWS name servers to configure the DNS server values to connect with our domain.
S3 Buckets
The next vital task to complete the cloud resume challenge was to create the S3 Bucket on AWS. The purpose of this bucket is to allow us to store files for our website display. In my case, the uploaded files are the HTML, CSS, and JS files.
I created a total of 3 buckets for; ajiebasuki.com, www.ajiebasuki.com, and resume.ajiebasuki.com. It’s important to note that these three buckets are configured to the endpoints of each bucket to automatically redirect anyone using www.ajiebasuki.com, and resume.ajiebasuki.com, to the main domain, ajiebasuki.com.
HTTP/HTTPS
So after creating the buckets, the first thing to do was to check our website. Doing that made me realize that the protocol being used for my domain is HTTP. Since we know that HTTP is not secure enough these days, I had to change our protocol to HTTPS. To do that, I used AWS certificate manager to issue an SSL certificate to support HTTPS. After doing that, we were able to get the CNAME for our domains and create the record to connect it with our Route 53 record.
CloudFront
To allow anyone worldwide access to my website within seconds, I used CloudFront to create distributions for my bare domain, www domain, and resume dot domain. This works by using the different edge locations that amazon has throughout the world to make sure that the content being delivered is fast and reliable. In addition to that, CloudFront is also used to protect us from hackers taking down our website or service.
Visitor Count
The task that we did was to get the visitor count working. We used DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and AWS API Gateway. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service that is used to track the data of the website — so knowing that the first thing I did was to create two tables for visitor and visitor count. Then I used the AWS Lambda. AWS Lambda is a python based function that I used by importing boto3 and a python library to increase the count in the database by the increment of 1. Lastly, I used an API gateway to get that function displayed on my website. API gateway is created by using AWS Lambda to respond to the API Gateway request from the function. Then, I used JavaScript to get the visitor counter API that was just created, and then I could finally upload that file to the S3 bucket and see the visitor count.
HTML/CSS
In my case, I used the resume template that The Cloud Resume Challenge Book provided. The purpose of the HTML file is to allow us to edit what gets displayed on our website. In addition to that, a CSS file will enable us to make changes to the text formatting, font styles, margins, etc., of the content of the resume website we are creating.
This part of the challenge is the part that took me the most extended amount of time. The reason for that is because, even though I have some experience with MySQL or Python, HTML is just different. To be more specific, the issue I was having was getting the page to format the way I wanted; no matter the screen size or what device you’re using. I figured everything out, and finally, everything turned out just how I expected it to be.
Final Thoughts
As I mentioned earlier, before taking this Networking and Cloud Computing class, I had never had any interest or experience with anything related to this. However, after spending a lot of time working on this challenge, I can admit to myself and to everyone that I ACTUALLY had fun and learned a lot. The critical takeaway from completing this challenge is that every detail matters when it comes to programming and configuring a cloud computing service like this. Making small mistakes like mislabeling a record or forgetting to put a single period on a file makes the difference between getting an error message and having your site display properly. So, in conclusion, after getting everything completed, I can say that this has been really fun, and it was exciting to be able to physically see what you have created on a computer.