Exploring Amazon S3: Hosting My Resume for My Personal Website

As I continued to build my personal software engineering projects and develop my own website, I recently encountered a challenge that required me to dive into the world of Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). The task at hand was to serve my resume, a PDF file, on my website. Initially, I attempted to include the PDF in my website’s source files, but I quickly ran into issues with relative routing. After some research, I decided to try hosting the file in an Amazon S3 bucket, even though I had never done it before. Surprisingly, the process turned out to be straightforward and efficient.

Here’s how I went about hosting my resume on Amazon S3:

Create an Amazon S3 Bucket

First, I logged into my AWS (Amazon Web Services) account and navigated to the Amazon S3 dashboard. From there, I clicked on the “Create bucket” button.
I provided a unique name for my bucket, making sure it was globally unique across all of AWS.

Add My PDF to the Bucket

After creating the bucket, I went to its properties and selected the “Upload” option.
I selected my resume PDF file from my local machine and uploaded it to the bucket.

Adjust the Permissions Policy

To ensure that my resume would be accessible to the public, I needed to adjust the bucket’s permissions policy.
I went to the “Permissions” tab for my bucket and clicked on “Bucket policy.”
In the bucket policy editor, I added the following policy:

{
   "Version": "2012-10-17",
   "Statement": [
       {
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Principal": "*",
           "Action": "s3:GetObject",
           "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::tylerpersonalsitebucket/*"
       }
   ]
}

This policy allows anyone to retrieve objects (in this case, my resume) from the specified resource.

Retrieve the Object URL

Next, I needed to get the URL at which my resume file was hosted. To do this, I navigated to my bucket, found the resume PDF file, and clicked on it.
In the object details page, I found the “Object URL” which I would later use to link to my resume.

Add the Resume Link to My Info Page