Udacity Cloud Developer Nanodegree experience
This is my first post here. I hope I can give some insights of what I have gone through from this course. The course mentions you need to have prerequisites such as JS, Nodejs, express etc. I first thought okay, cool. I have got this. I have taken few courses from Coursera and Udemy before this. So won’t be a big deal. I enrolled in this course to learn more about backend development and AWS too. Found that I need to use TypeScript for backend and React JS for frontend (bummer!).
Tips for completing the projects
First module was super simple, watch videos, set up s3 bucket and deploy a static website on AWS. I was happy that I got it done the first week.
Second module included developing and deploying a full stack application using AWS services. The application was simple, all I had to do was upload an image. There is a catch here, the first module the instructor uses a MySQL and the second instructor uses PostgreSQL from RDS service of AWS. So, make sure you follow and use PostgreSQL. Do not get confused with PostbirdDB which is used for testing. Be patient and wait till the PostgreSQL database is created. I was in a hurry and followed the instructor saying you can restart….but ended up starting from scratch. Make sure to change the postman collection url. The url given in the stater code returns error. Sat on this for couple of days and finally completed this project.
Third module was about converting monolith application to microservices architecture. I would say this was the most frustrating project in the whole program. The starter code given in the rubric was the wrong. Finally, found out that from a mentor from knowledgebase. Search for the right one once you start with this project. After this it gets bit easy. However, deploying in travis CI can be a pain. I had issues with the different dependencies. The package.json given in the starter code had older dependency version. I would say expect that. I tried from Nodejs versions 8 -12 finally worked for 11.X. After a week of struggle, I submitted this project.
Fourth module involved developing and deploying using Serverless architecture. I would say second and this module were my favorites. The road blocks I faced during this project was authorization using RS256algorithm and the image upload url. It was not as frustrating as the 3rd module. For this project I had to switch to Node 12.x. Finally, completed this project too. I also started my capstone project simultaneously while working on this. I submitted both projects around the same timeline.
For the most part I had to watch the videos 2–3 times and practice before I started my projects. I learnt to read all the questions asked in the KB before I started the project. It took me less than 4 months to finish this course.
Note: Right after enrolling email support to give you Amazon redeem coupon for using AWS. After creating IAM users with Admin access for projects, make sure to update them both in ~/.aws/config and ~/.aws/credentials.
At the end make sure to delete all the resources once your project is approved. Else, you may end up paying Amazon.
Overall, challenging but worth learning cloud development. Wanna chat more? Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Happy Coding!
