Cloud Resume Challenge

The Cloud Resume Challenge was launched a few years back, and it has grown in popularity ever since. It’s a great introduction to Cloud skills for new engineers, helping you put learnings directly into practice as you build a personal website to display your CV. That static site can then be built out into a larger project, aiding in self-promotion as you enter the job market.  

The challenge sets users the task of building a static website with a visitor counter, deployed to a Cloud provider of their choice. The rules? It should be delivered using infrastructure as code (IaC), in a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) delivery pipeline. The site should also make use of good security practices, and utilise a serverless backend.

For those looking to go further to showcase their skills, our Cloud team have worked up their own extension to the challenge, based on the current needs of the market. The skills you'll pick up here will also set you in great stead if you're ever to find yourself in a Cloud interview at AND!

Challenge Extension

Using the original challenge as a base, we’d love to see people attempting the following modifications and extensions:

• IaC: the original challenge suggests using Terraform for GCP, or provider template command-line interfaces (CLIs) otherwise. Here are some alternatives:
  
  
• Cloud Development Kits (AWS or Terraform). This is a great opportunity to use a code-native approach and demonstrate knowledge in a specific provider.
• Pulumi. Again code-native, but with the advantage of being provider agnostic.
• Terraform. The default option, but if you decide to use it, it’s worth learning to make good use of the module library.
  
  
• Operations support. We’d love to see some of the following features included, modelling the project as though it were a business offering and better representing real world cloud engineering workflows:
  
  
• Logging: included components and services should collect and centralise logs.
• Monitoring:  where possible, API and service performance should be routed to a monitoring centre of the challenger’s choice.
• Security tests should be run on your infrastructure as well as your code. There are a range of tools available for this purpose.
  
  
• Project documentation. The project should be presented as a product offering with the following elements included in the public repos:
  
  
• Specification statement for product owners.
• CODE-OWNERS file and licensing.
• A clear README.
• Engineer’s documentation for project handover (even if you have no intention of doing so).
• As a bonus, include a project log or update log.
  
  
• Demonstrate cloud provider best practices, following the recommendations of the platform you choose to use.
• Extension: whilst still utilising serverless infrastructure, feel free to move beyond a simple static website and develop a containerised microservice webapp. Even if you use pre-existing or example containers, this added layer can demonstrate your skills with technologies common to cloud web backends.

Over AND Out

Thank you for taking the time to read. We’d love to see how you get on with the modified challenge, and are happy to take feedback on how to improve it.

Tristan Clapp is an Associate Cloud Engineer at AND Digital.