Embarking on the 30-Day DevOps Challenge 🚀
I have officially kicked off a 30-Day DevOps Challenge! The mission? To build hands-on cloud skills by tackling real-world projects. My first venture: creating a serverless weather dashboard that fetches live weather data and stores it in AWS S3.
At first glance, the project seemed straightforward:
👉 Fetch weather data from an API
👉 Store it in the cloud
👉 Retrieve and display it later
But as I quickly learned, real-world cloud projects often come with hidden complexities. That’s the fun of it, though! 😆
Step 1: Fetching Weather Data Like a Pro 🌤️
To get real-time weather updates, I chose the OpenWeather API—a user-friendly service that provides details like temperature, humidity, and conditions for any city.
With my API key in hand, I made a request and… voilà, instant weather data! ✅
This first step was a breeze, and I was feeling confident about what was next.
Step 2: Storing Data in the Cloud 🌐
Rather than saving the data locally, I opted to store it in Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)—a scalable cloud-based storage solution. This approach not only allowed me to keep weather records over time but also access them from anywhere.
Sounds simple, right? Not so fast. AWS had some surprises in store.
🙃 Reality Check #1: Uploading data to S3 isn’t enough; configuring the bucket correctly is essential.
🙃 Reality Check #2: AWS’s strict security settings are a double-edged sword—great for safety, challenging when you’re starting out.
After a bit of troubleshooting (and several Google searches), I successfully configured my S3 bucket and uploaded my first weather data file. ✅
Step 3: Cracking the S3 Permissions Puzzle 🔐
Here’s where I hit my first real DevOps roadblock. Although my data was in S3, I kept encountering 403 Forbidden errors when trying to access it.
As it turns out, S3 buckets are private by default (a smart security feature). To make the data accessible, I needed to adjust my bucket policy to allow public read access.
Cue troubleshooting mode:
✔️ Reviewed bucket policies
✔️ Disabled “Block Public Access” settings (the sneaky culprit)
✔️ Updated object-level permissions
After some trial and error, I finally got it working. Lesson learned: Security is a cornerstone of cloud computing, and AWS’s default settings reflect that.
Lessons Learned on Day 1 💡
🎯 Cloud services are powerful, but security is always a top priority.
🎯 Permissions and access control require patience and persistence.
🎯 DevOps is all about learning through solving real problems.
By the end of Day 1, I had a working setup: weather data pulled from an API and stored securely in AWS S3.
Top comments (0)