I Built the Cloud Resume Challenge on AWS — Here's Everything I Learned

I'm currently studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) and I wanted to go beyond flashcards and practice exams. The Cloud Resume Challenge by Forrest Brazeal is exactly what I needed — a project that forces you to use the services you're studying in a real, production-grade deployment. Here's what I built and what I actually learned along the way. The Stack S3 · CloudFront · ACM · Lambda (Python) · DynamoDB · API Gateway · Terraform · GitHub Actions All running on AWS Free Tier. Total cost: $0. Live site: https://d19mfjmr0dtnqm.cloudfront.net GitHub: https://github.com/RavjotD/cloud-resume-challenge-aws Week by Week Week 1–2: S3 + CloudFront Started by writing my resume in plain HTML and CSS, deploying it to an S3 bucket with static website hosting enabled, and putting CloudFront in front of it for HTTPS and global edge caching. The moment I opened that CloudFront URL and saw my resume load over HTTPS from a CDN was the first real "I built this" moment. One thing I