What's the Purpose of this Blog Post?
This blog exists to document my experience with Forrest Brazeal's Cloud Resume Challenge (CRC). I decided to take the challenge because I wanted to learn more about cloud computing, as most of my experience is with on-prem IT.
My GitHub Repository for this project is here: https://github.com/SkelingtonBoi/Cloud-Resume-Challenge-Azure
My CRC website is here: https://www.skelingtonboi.com (if you're reading this in the future and the link doesn't work, I probably let the domain expire).
The CRC is broken up into "chunks" to help newcomers organize the work, so I will format this post to align with those chunks.
Why Azure?
In the industry I work in, Microsoft is the king when it comes to enterprise technology. This is no different when it comes to cloud, in my experience at least. Azure seemed like the safest bet, so I stuck with it for the CRC. I bought the multi-cloud bundle of the CRC book in case I ever wanted to do the AWS or GCP versions of the project in the future.
A Quick Word on A.I.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the new, hot tech since the CRC was first created back in 2020; there's mention of AI and it's use for the challenge and some guidelines. I'll reiterate the main point here:
Your use of A.I. for a coding project will go so far as your ability to ask the right questions; this means you must fundamentally understand what your problem(s) are to use AI in an efficient manner.
I used AI (CoPilot in VScode and some Grok) to help me write my code since my coding skills aren't that great (I'm a SysAdmin by trade); additionally, I used AI to help me understand code I found on the internet. Truthfully, using AI to explain what a piece of code was doing helped me more than using AI to generate code! It was a good exercise for me to figure how to break down the problems I was facing...once I understood the problems, asking CoPilot for assistance became easy and helpful!
Chunk 0 - Get a Cert
I already had AZ-900, as I took the test back in 2022 actually. I knew that Azure was becoming more popular in my industry, so I wanted to have something on my resume to show that I was at least a little cloud literate. Microsoft Learn has a lot of good documentation to help newcomers understand their products.
Chunk 1 - Build a Website
I used CloudFlare for my domain purchase. Overall it was very easy and I found the domain I wanted at a good price. I ended up using the website HTML/CSS code from A Cloud Guru, as I wanted to focus on the back-end cloud more so than web design. They provided a good website template, why fix something that isn't broke? Creating the Azure CDN was easy enough and it was very easy to get my custom domain attached to the CDN.
Chunk 2 - Make the Back End Database
This was a challenge, as I had to learn how to use CosmoDB and Azure Functions. I opted to use NoSQL for my DB, as I was finding more documentation for NoSQL databases than "Table" databases mentioned in the CRC book. Azure Functions also took me a while to wrap my head around, but it seemed very cool once it started clicking. (Side Note: Get the Azure VScode plugins for the respective Azure tools, they help a whole lot.)
Chunk 3 - Connecting Front and Back
I found this part challenging as well, knowing that I'm not the strongest programmer in the world. Once I was able to get that part figured out, and I saw that my visitor counter was accurately updating on the page, it was very satisfying! (Pro tip: don't forget to purge the CDN when you make changes to your website!)
Chunk 4 - Infrastructure as Code
This part was the most fascinating to me, as I have Configuration as Code experience with Ansible. Terraform and IaC are newer to me, but very cool. I enjoyed seeing my configurations come to life from the Terraform CLI into the Azure Portal! What I did not expect from this exercise was realizing that most of the Terraform skill seemed to come not from knowing Terraform syntax, but from knowing the individual cloud services well enough to properly describe them in HCL.
Read the Docs!
Conclusion
Overall, I'm really glad that I did the Cloud Resume Challenge, as it really helped me better understand key cloud concepts. Studying for a cert is good...but nothing can beat the reality of building something, having it break, and needing to read the docs to figure out how to fix it!
If you're on the fence about taking this challenge, I'd say go for it!
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