I’m excited to announce that my personal website is officially live! 🎉 This project marks a significant milestone in my cloud computing journey, where I applied the skills I’ve learned from practice labs and took on a full cloud project. In this post, I’ll walk through how I moved from hands-on labs to building and deploying my own custom website using AWS services, along with a little help from Replit and Chatgpt for coding.

The Beginning: Gaining Cloud Skills 🌩️

It all started with courses and practice labs at AWS Cloud Institute and Western Governors University (WGU), which helped me build a solid foundation in cloud computing. After becoming more familiar with AWS services like S3, Route 53, CloudFront, and AWS Certificate Manager, I wanted to put my knowledge into action. That’s when I decided to create a portfolio website that would showcase both my technical and creative abilities.

The Project: Building My Portfolio Website 💻

For this project, I chose to build a custom-designed portfolio site from scratch. Here’s a breakdown of the tech stack I used:

• Replit: Replit was an invaluable tool during the development process. It allowed me to code my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a collaborative, cloud-based environment, which made it easy to experiment and test changes in real time.
• HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: I used these to code the structure, design, and interactivity of the site. Creating a custom design from scratch gave me full control over the look and functionality, and Replit’s interface helped streamline the coding process.
• Amazon S3: I hosted the static website on S3. It’s a reliable and scalable option for static sites, and it integrates seamlessly with other AWS services for a smooth deployment experience.
• Amazon Route 53: I used Route 53 for domain management and DNS routing, ensuring that visitors can easily access my site from anywhere.
• AWS Certificate Manager (ACM): Securing the website was a top priority, so I used ACM to handle SSL certificates, providing HTTPS encryption for a professional and secure browsing experience.
• Amazon CloudFront: CloudFront, AWS’s global content delivery network (CDN), was key to improving the performance and speed of my site, especially for global visitors.

Overcoming Challenges 🛠️

Building this website was a rewarding challenge. One tricky part was getting CloudFront and ACM to work together to enable custom SSL certificates, but after some trial and error, I resolved the configuration issues. Replit made it easy to troubleshoot the front-end design, but managing the DNS records in Route 53 took extra care and attention to detail.

Key Takeaways 📚

Working on this project taught me a lot about both cloud infrastructure and web development. Some of my biggest takeaways include:

• DNS management is crucial: Getting the right settings in Route 53 was essential to ensuring my site was accessible and integrated properly with other services.
• Security is a must: Using ACM to secure my site with HTTPS was easier than expected and made a huge difference in terms of professionalism and security.
• A CDN makes all the difference: CloudFront significantly improved load times, especially for global visitors, which highlights the importance of using a content delivery network for performance.

What’s Next? 🔮

Launching this site is just the beginning! I’m planning to continue expanding my portfolio with new cloud-based projects, like serverless applications and infrastructure as code. My website will be a platform where I showcase all of these future endeavors, so stay tuned for updates!

Check out my website here: techwithnorma.click—I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks for reading! 🌟 If you’re working on your own project, I highly recommend jumping in—tools like Replit make the coding process smooth, and building something from scratch is the best way to learn. 👩‍💻