Templating GCP Infrastructure With Terraform Modules

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As I mentioned in my Cloud Resume Challenge post about IaC, one of the great things about Terraform code is its reusability. There are countless ways to architect and configure your cloud environment but chances are that you’ll spend a lot of time reusing the same essential building blocks. By separating your Terraform files out … Read more

Cloud Resume Challenge – Summary, Learnings & Next Steps

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For the past few weeks I’ve been working to complete the Cloud Resume Challenge. The challenge is intended for people (such as myself) who are looking to move into a more technical role in Cloud specifically, and have technical skills but not the most techie of CVs! The challenge outlines a number of technologies and … Read more

Cloud Resume Challenge, Step 14 & 15, CI/CD

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I’m nearly on the home stretch of the Cloud Resume Challenge! In this penultimate step (technically two steps but I’ll discuss them at the same time here), you’re required to set up CI/CD pipelines for your front and back ends, such that when commits are pushed to GitHub, your code is tested and – following … Read more

Cloud Resume Challenge – Step 13, Source Control

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This step of the Cloud Resume Challenge requires that you maintain and version your code using some form of Source Control. I’ve actually been doing this all along but it’s technically step 13 so I’ve held off talking about it until now 🙂 Like most people, I’m using Git. Technically other Source Control tools are … Read more

Cloud Resume Challenge – Step 12, Infrastructure As Code

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This next step in the project concerns Infrastructure As Code (IaC.) One of the great benefits of a virtualised and entirely remote platform such as GCP is that, since all the resources on which your infrastructure depends can be created and modified with individual commands, these commands can also be represented as code. This means … Read more

Cloud Resume Challenge – Visitor Counter Part 4, JavaScript

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Now that we have our API up and running, it’s time to add some JavaScript code to the front-end to call the API and display the results as a visitor count. JavaScript has long been the language used to add functionality and interactivity to otherwise static webpages. Historically, JavaScript has usually run in-browser at the … Read more

Cloud Resume Challenge – Visitor Counter Part 3, API Gateway

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So, I’ve built a functioning API with Cloud Run and Datastore. Technically speaking, I now have a URL that my frontend JavaScript code could use to query and update the visitor count but there are a few reasons not to do this. It’s better to expose an API via a dedicated platform that centralises authentication, … Read more

Cloud Resume Challenge – Visitor Counter Part 2, API (Python & Cloud Run)

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This part of the challenge requires that – rather than querying and updating the database directly from our JavaScript code – I should instead build an API in Python using either of the serverless solutions Cloud Functions or Cloud Run, and that we then put an API Gateway in front of that. Let’s unpack that … Read more

Cloud Resume Challenge – Visitor Counter Part 1, Database

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In the earlier parts of the challenge, I’d been working through the steps sequentially (for the most part!) Now we come to building the visitor counter, I feel like I need to approach things a little differently. The brief is to use Javascript make an API POST request from API Gateway, which activates a Cloud … Read more