I Built a Serverless Resume Site on AWS. Here's Everything That Broke Along the Way
After a decade in insurance operations, I decided to make my pivot into cloud engineering official by doing the Cloud Resume Challenge ! I wanted to build it according to real-world best practices, so in addition to the steps the challenge provides, I incorporated a private S3 bucket secured with CloudFront Origin Access Control, a dedicated least-privilege IAM user scoped to only the permissions…
After a decade in insurance operations, the author decided to make a career change into cloud engineering by participating in the Cloud Resume Challenge. The goal was to build a resume site with real-world best practices, such as using a private S3 bucket, a least-privilege IAM user, and mocked unit tests. The completed site is live at derekjackson.click.
The site consists of a static frontend stored in an S3 bucket, a Lambda-powered visitor counter, and a Terraform-coded infrastructure deployment managed by GitHub Actions. The author details several challenges encountered during the project, including domain registration issues, SSL certificate failures, misalignment between Terraform and AWS console infrastructure, and text editor corruption. Each hiccup is followed by a valuable lesson learned to avoid similar problems in the future.
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