Cloud Resume Challenge

Building a Serverless Resume on AWS I rebuilt my resume as a live AWS application instead of a PDF. It's a static site backed by a real serverless pipeline: a visitor counter that reads and writes to a database, behind an API, deployed through infrastructure as code, with its own CI/CD pipeline pushing updates automatically. I did this through the Cloud Resume Challenge, and this post walks through how it's built and what I actually learned doing it. The Architecture The site itself is static: HTML and CSS, no server rendering anything on the fly. It's hosted in an S3 bucket, sitting behind CloudFront, with Route 53 pointing my custom domain at the CloudFront distribution. Nobody hits S3 directly. Every request goes through CloudFront first, which means consistent load times no matter where in the world someone's loading the page from, and it keeps the actual storage layer shielded from direct traffic. That's the whole story for the page itself. The visitor counter is a separate thing entirely, and it only starts once the page has already finished loading. Once the page renders, JavaScript running in the browser fires off a fetch to API Gateway. API Gateway invokes a Lambda function through a resource policy attached directly to it, that's a different kind of permission than the role Lambda itself uses, one controls who can call Lambda, the other controls what Lambda is allowed to do once it's running. The Lambda function uses its own execution role to read and write a single item in a DynamoDB table: the current visitor count. It increments that number, writes it back, and the result travels back through Lambda, through API Gateway, and into the page, where the count updates on screen. Every piece of this, the S3 bucket, CloudFront, Route 53, the IAM roles, the Lambda function, the DynamoDB table, API Gateway, was provisioned through Terraform. None of it was clicked together in the AWS console. And once it was built, GitHub Actions took over deployment entirely: p