The One IT/Software E-Book That Is Worth Buying

I've looked into tons of reading material during my software developer career. There is the gambit of the good, bad, and ugly. But there is one E-Book in particular that is a cut above the rest. If you are looking to give your resume some extra shine to it, this one is worth the investment.

It is:

The Cloud Resume Challenge by Forrest Brazeal

The Cloud Resume Challenge contains three E-Books, one for each major cloud provider. If you are looking to put time into learning a particular cloud environment, I suggest picking just the one you are interested in. The concept is simple, upload an HTML version of your resume as a static website. Sounds easy enough right?

Well, it is, but that is not the point.

Understanding the full gambit of cloud infrastructure and everything that goes with it can be dizzying. There is a multitude of concepts that a cloud engineer needs to juggle:

• Pricing
• Resource Allocation
• Scalability
• Disaster Recovery
• Authentication / Authorization
• Automation
• Observability / Monitoring
• And the list goes on, and on…

That is what makes this challenge so great. The required footprint is tiny, but all of the moving parts that maintain it and keep it going are vast. What is better is that there is no failure condition for this challenge either. You can put in as much or as little as you need.

If you are a beginner, then you can bite off as much as you are comfortable with. If you are a seasoned IT professional, you can push the limits as much as you need to. If you work a job that has regulatory restrictions on your work (such as finance, health care, etc), then you can apply those restrictions to the project as well.

The Cloud Resume Challenge truly is a "choose your own adventure" e-book. And that is what makes it great. You have the option for breadth vs depth vs specialized. No matter who you are as a professional in this space, this challenge will have something of value for you.

What the Challenge Is and Is Not

This challenge is not a step-by-step guide on how to implement a cloud static website. There are light guardrails that guide the challenge, but other than that, you are on your own. This is a good thing.

If you are coming into this fresh, you need to develop your troubleshooting and research instincts. There are any number of hurdles and errors you can run across as you tackle this challenge. It is up to you as the engineer to figure out the solution for yourself. This can be documentation, StackOverflow posts, Medium, contacting others in the community, etc.

This resembles the day-to-day workflow of an IT professional. It is not just finding the "right" answer. It is about finding the "best" answer in conjunction with your particular context.

Every professional and business has its specific environment and limitations it needs to deal with. It would be nice to have ideal circumstances and the perfect static website in the cloud. But almost 100% of the time that is just not in the cards.

Let's say for example you want to implement the Grafana stack to your static website. You want to have observability and monitoring on the website. If the static website goes down, you want to send an email if the website is non-responsive after five minutes. If an exception gets thrown when pulling data from the serverless function, you want logging and tracing of that exception. That all sounds great!

Now how much time are you going to spend implementing all of that? If you are new to all of this, it might take a considerable amount of time to get all of that up and running. This is all new technology to you after all. Even if you are a Senior SRE/DevOps Engineer, getting all of that set up with the proper observability metrics as a Grafana dashboard will take time.

That is the most important resource you have to manage and get accustomed to for this challenge: Time. Each piece you add to this challenge takes time. And that is not to say you should do a slapdash implementation of the website. What I am saying you should sit down and take in all of the considerations of what a decent static website looks like. Then analyze the amount of time it will take to get it there. Find the pieces you will add, and discard the pieces that are not necessary or too expensive.

If you put the effort in, you will see the benefits of going through this challenge. That much, I can guarantee.

My Experience

My current full-time job is working in the finance sector as a software developer. The biggest regulatory standard we have to abide by is the Sarbanes-Oxley audit (also known as the SOX audit). So there are certain things I wanted to make sure I get up and running to make sure my static website passes its own SOX audit. These include:

• Disaster Recovery / Failover
• Unit Testing and Code Coverage Reports
• CI/CD and Automation
• Infrastructure as Code
• Observability and Monitoring

A quick summary of what I did was utilize Terraform to create ephemeral environments whenever a new branch is created for the feature I wanted to implement. When a Pull Request is created, unit tests would run showing code coverage and a report that shows all of the classes and methods tested as an artifact. When code changes get pushed into the main branch, Terraform would tear down the ephemeral environment. The automated deployment utilized federated credentials to deploy to the correct environment and instance. This helped maintain security across the entire pipeline.

Azure Application Insights would run against the static website to give details on usage and viewers. If the website or CosmosDB happened to go down, there is a disaster recovery instance that would be available to take its place.

That is as far as I wanted to go. I wanted to get authentication/authorization running, but that was going to take more time than I had already put into this challenge. I think what I constructed is a fair take on The Cloud Resume Challenge.

Closing Thoughts

A career in information technology is all about what you put into it is what you get out of it. Having the mindset of a self-starter will make you go far in this industry.

I learned a lot when I went through The Cloud Resume Challenge. The concepts that it presents and encourages you to go through are ones I utilize every day. I have recommended this e-book to people in my job in the last couple of years, and now I am coming here to do the same.

Forrest Brazeal has done an exceptional job with this e-book. And I hope you think the same.