In the last article I covered building a static website and an online resume using HTML/CSS and Javascript. After that part was finished it was finally time for the Cloud part of the Cloud Resume Challenge. A static website is probably the smallest and simplest thing the cloud can do, they existed way before what we call the Cloud. The next step will be using the more advanced capabilities that power the moder internet and all it's online businesses and tools.

Oh boy... I felt like this one was gonna be a hard one. My choice to use the Internet Computer was not going to make this step easy. I could not just load up CosmosDB on Azure or DynamoDB on AWS. I mean, I probably could, but I needed a database on the IC if I wanted to stick to my plan of never paying fees or subscriptions. Certainly the IC had the capability, but I certainly did not know what it was or how to use it. Was I going to have to learn some Motoko, the IC native programming language? Hopefully I could just use Rust or maybe even Python since that is required for a later step in the Challenge anyway. I would also have to learn an IC database tool at the same time. Unless... Unless Azure CosmosDB had a perpetual free tier. Would you look at that! It does! As long as you stay under 400 Requests per second and under 25 GB total storage! Easy! In fact, that seems downright generous! I realize that I am falling right into their trap. They offer a sample of the good stuff to get you hooked. Here I am learning Azure Cloud databases when I said earlier that I didn't want anything to do with FAANG. But, my real goal was not to pay any subscriptions or fees outside of the upfront payment I made for Internet Computer tokens. Azure, here I come! Signing up for an Azure account was simple, as was navigating the portal. There is an 'always free' tier for the standard Azure SQL database as well. I thought about that for a bit, but the database tools I found for the Internet Computer were NoSQL just like CosmosDB. I still might migrate fully over to the IC if these Azure services ever threaten to stop being free. Learning NoSQL seemed like a good idea. I created a CosmosDB free account on the Azure Portal and made a new Database and Container, which Microsoft does make pretty simple. Thank goodness. Simple and free don't usually go hand in hand when it comes to technology. That is pretty much it for this step. Actually using the database comes in the next steps.

In order to use the database on my website the Challenge requires creating an API to handle communication between the Javascript on the website and the database. For this I can use Azure Funtions, which also has a free tier! I could host code in the Azure Cloud serverlessly as well and get One Million free function calls per month! If these actually stay then I might just leave it like this. The Internet Computer could also do all of this for a negligible amount of tokens. But, I will worry about that later when I want to learn some Rust. This was a pretty exciting step. Being able to write and call custom code from my static website would make it a whole lot more dynamic! I had plenty of ideas running through my head about what I could do with this power. But, first thing first. For now it was time to write some Python and learn how to call funtions from a website.

Outro here Continue the jorney in Part 4 here: Cloud Resume Journey - Part 4