Cloud Resume Challenge — Phase 5: IaC, CI/CD & Smoke Testing

Phase 5 replaces all the manually created resources with Terraform and builds a pipeline that deploys and validates automatically.

Terraform

I defined every backend resource in HCL:

• Lambda function with packaged Python code, IAM execution role, and CloudWatch log group
• API Gateway with REST routes, Lambda integration, CORS settings, and stage deployment
• DynamoDB table with partition key and on-demand billing
• S3 bucket for frontend static hosting
• ACM certificate, CloudFront distribution, and Route 53 records

One terraform apply stands up the entire stack. One terraform destroy tears it down cleanly. No more console-created resources drifting from what's in code.

CI/CD Pipeline

The GitHub Actions workflow runs three stages:

1. Build — Package the Lambda function code, install dependencies, and produce a deployment artifact.
2. Deploy — Run terraform apply to create or update all AWS resources.
3. Smoke test — Execute Cypress tests against the live API to confirm the counter works end-to-end.

If any stage fails, the pipeline stops and the commit is marked as failed.

Takeaways

The Cloud Resume Challenge forced me to work across the full stack — static hosting, serverless compute, databases, DNS, IaC, and CI/CD. The result is a production-grade system where every resource is defined in code, every change is deployed automatically, and every deploy is validated by tests.