August 2026
Finish this and you stop being someone who studied cloud. You become someone who has built on it — with a link to prove it.
Certificates say you sat through something. A working system with a public address says you can do the job. Every hiring manager knows the difference, and this is the thing they ask to see.
This document gives you objectives, not instructions. Each step tells you what must be true when you’re done. It does not tell you how to do it. That is deliberate, and it is the whole point.
Being stuck, searching, reading documentation, trying something that fails, and working out why — that is the job. An engineer who has only ever followed step-by-step instructions has practised following instructions. An engineer who has fought through an error message at 11pm has practised engineering. This capstone is designed to make you do the second one.
So when you get stuck — and you will, repeatedly — that is not the capstone going wrong. That is the capstone working.
Rules:
Roughly how long: two to six weeks of evenings for most people. Faster is not better here.
Register a domain name that is yours. Your name is ideal. It will cost roughly $10–15 a year and it is the only part of this capstone that costs money — if that is not possible for you, use the free subdomain your hosting provides and note it in your write-up.
Done when: typing your domain into a browser reaches something you control.
A single page is fine. It should be your CV: who you are, what you can do, what you have built. Write the HTML yourself — no site builders, no templates you don’t understand. You must be able to explain every line.
Done when: the page opens correctly on both a phone and a laptop.
Your site must be served from cloud object storage — S3 on AWS, Blob Storage on Azure — configured for static website hosting. Not a web server. Not a hosting company. Object storage.
Done when: the site loads from the storage endpoint URL.
Serve it through a content delivery network —
CloudFront or Azure Front Door — with
a valid TLS certificate, so it loads over https:// with no
browser warning, and your custom domain points at it.
Done when: https://yourdomain.com loads with a
padlock, and you can explain what the CDN is actually doing for you.
Checkpoint. You now have a real production website on real cloud infrastructure. Most people who “learn cloud” never get this far.
Your page must display how many times it has been viewed. The count must survive a refresh and be the same for everyone.
Done when: the number goes up when someone else visits, not just you.
That number lives in a cloud database — DynamoDB or Cosmos DB. Not in a file, not in the browser.
Done when: you can see the record in the database console and watch it change.
The webpage must not talk to the database directly. It calls an API, and the API talks to the database. Use a serverless function — Lambda or Azure Functions — behind API Gateway or an HTTP trigger.
Done when: the site works, and there are no database credentials anywhere in your webpage’s code.
Why this step exists: putting credentials in front-end code is one of the most common serious security mistakes in the industry. Building it correctly once means you will never be tempted.
The function must have permission to do exactly one thing — read and update that one counter — and nothing else. Not “full access.” Not an administrator role.
Done when: you can state, in one sentence, precisely what your function is permitted to do, and you have deleted every permission beyond that.
At least one automated test that checks your API returns what it should. It must fail if you break the code.
Done when: you deliberately break the function, the test fails, you fix it, the test passes.
Every cloud resource must be defined in code — Terraform or OpenTofu (both clouds), or CloudFormation / Bicep. Then prove it: destroy everything and rebuild it from your code alone.
Done when: you have deleted your entire stack and brought it back with one command. This is the single most important step in the capstone. Anyone can click buttons in a console. Being able to destroy and rebuild is what separates an engineer from a user.
Set up a CI/CD pipeline — GitHub Actions is free and works with both clouds. When you push a change to your repository, the site updates by itself. No manual uploads, ever again.
Done when: you change one word, push it, and the live site updates without you touching the cloud console.
A blog post, on your own site, explaining what you built and how. It must include:
That failure section is not filler. It is the part hiring managers read most carefully, because it is the only part that proves you can debug rather than just follow.
Your code goes in a public GitHub repository with a README explaining how it works. Your write-up goes online. Both links go on your CV.
Done when: a stranger can find your work, read it, and understand what you did without asking you.
Optional, and each one is a genuine talking point in an interview:
Before you call it finished, answer these out loud. If you cannot, you have found your next week of study:
Your finished capstone gives you three links:
Put all three at the top of your CV, above your education. Then, in an interview, when they ask “tell me about something you’ve built,” you will not be describing a course you took. You will be opening a browser.
Part of the free B4LCILC cloud courses. This capstone is inspired by the community-built project-first tradition of cloud learning, especially Forrest Brazeal’s Cloud Resume Challenge — with a dual-cloud, AWS-and-Azure structure of our own. Build it, publish it, and tell someone.