From Static HTML to Cloud Infrastructure: My Cloud Resume Challenge Journey
When I first read about the Cloud Resume Challenge, I knew that it would be tough. I chose to complete the challenge using Azure. I’d learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript years ago via freecodecamp.org, so the resume portion of the challenge wasn’t as difficult as it may be for some. I’m a Senior IT Specialist, not a developer, so my web development skills have declined over the years. The resume took a few hours. The cloud infrastructure behind it took about two weeks of troubleshooting, reading documentation, and staring at GitHub Actions logs at midnight. Here's what I learned, and what actually surprised me along the way.
Starting Simple, Getting Complicated Fast
The challenge starts deceptively easy: build your resume in HTML and CSS. As an IT professional with a background in DoD environments, I'm comfortable with systems and tools, but I'd never built a full cloud-deployed web application from scratch. I figured HTML would be the warm-up lap before the real race.
What I didn't expect was how quickly the layers stacked up. By step 8, I was configuring a CosmosDB instance with the Table API in serverless mode. By step 12, I was writing ARM templates to define infrastructure as code. By step 14, I had GitHub Actions automatically running tests and deploying to Azure on every push to main. None of that was in my job description, nor was it a requirement for my degree program (B.S. Information Technology).
