Busy day yesterday. Didn’t get all that much AWS reading done but did get my copy of the third edition of ‘Amazon Web Services in Action’ from Amazon. It is clear that things have moved quite a way forward since last time I worked in AWS (and being an inside customer may make a difference as well).

One of the things we struggled with was the lack of MySQL support in AWS and adapting designs that expected that database was a challenge. It also appears that the filesystems for instances are now preserved in ways that those we were working with were not. We designed for the possibility that all compute nodes and their storage would disappear at the same time and the only thing we could safely count on was data in one of the persistent stores.

I’m going to keep reading to up date my understanding of where AWS is at this time. Interesting stuff and I’d be happy to find myself once again addressing challenges in the cloud.

I’ve got a cloud related interview this afternoon at 2:30. Looking forward to seeing whether there’s a fit there. My cloud coding is a bit out of date but I’m hoping I bring enough other things to the table to make it a fit. Definitely seems as if things are heating up a bit again on the job search front. Lots of variety as well so that’s good.

Working on bringing my view of cloud technologies up to date. Picked up a couple of recent books and reconnected to my AWS and Azure accounts. It has been a while since I played with this stuff and I want to get back into those tech stacks and see all of the interesting new things that have become available.

I’m seeing a lot of interesting roles out there that span embedded, medical and cloud in various ways and I’m looking to fill in my gaps to be better positioned to help in those areas.

There’s plenty of time in my day now around job search activities so it is a good time to dig in. I’m putting some of my multicast and encryption work on the back burner to get this done but will likely (if time permits) get back to that at some point.

Slower day today. Recovered my personal AWS account so I can do some things over there and verified that I can log in to my Azure account. Haven’t done much with the Azure account so far but I do want to see what they offer. In particular the choice between Java/Kotlin and C# seems interesting and C# feels more appropriate on Azure than on AWS.

These are both likely more capable than using PHP on my hosting here if I’m going to do RESTful web work and a number of home projects I’ve played with want a cloud hub to coordinate activities.

Today’s focus is going to be getting my C++ simple sample running on windows for send and receive. Mostly looking at just sending out the hostname and a few other similar items. May add in some other bits if time permits and might look at AES256GCM and HMAC SHA256 wrappers on a fixed key just as a starter.

I had considered using the GCM capability for validity checking in place of HMAC but after some more thought I realize that there are going to be places where peer key management needs unencrypted but verified information to be exchanged between peers.

That is for later but I want to start out in the right direction using standard, off the shelf approaches.

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So initial version here has an unencrypted length followed by the IV for symmetric encryption and perhaps a key identifier followed by the length of the encrypted block. This allows messages with mostly or entirely unencrypted payloads to be sent. It also should support varied message layouts and provide some additional checking along the way. Not sure quite how to structure the IV inclusion or the key id yet.

Key id will probably be a SHA256 hash (or part of one) of the key material.

IV may be smaller than the whole IV and use off the shelf PBKDF2 key expansion to generate the actual IV.

There is going to be some tension between including everything at full size and keeping as much space within the usual UDP MTU available for actual message content.

Starting month three of my job search. The rate of job contacts has slowed down (unsurprisingly) and I’m digging into tech refresher things and some new areas.

Doing some work on a ‘modern’ multicast telemetry encryption design. Looking at doing some general multicast coding in C++, C#, Java and Python as a good exercise (and to feed into the encryption part later). Spending some time increasing my depth of knowledge of Java Spring and Spring Boot as medical cloud opportunities seem very interesting. May dive into C# and Azure offerings as well at some point.

Still hopeful but certainly a bit discouraged. Have had a number of jobs get close but not close. Mostly small things like too little experience in some specific area…something I’m quite capable of dealing with but I certainly understand an employer deciding to take the safer route of going for someone who has everything they’re looking for.