I created my first AWS account at 10:31 PM on April 10th, 2006. I had seen the announcement of Amazon S3 and had been thinking vaguely about the problem of secure backups — even though I didn't start Tarsnap until several months later — and the idea of an online storage service appealed to me. The fact that it was a web service made it even more appealing; I had been building web services since 1998, when I decided that coordinating a world-record-setting computation of Pi over HTTP would be easier than doing it over email.

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Colin Percival was, for many years, the FreeBSD Security Officer. He is now the FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead. You can show your appreciation for today's blog post at his shares in Reddit, in Hacker News, or in LinkedIn.

Also: to Mastodon @cperciva@mastodon.social @stefano and to Lobsters.

A thought: AWS has its heroes. Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source – for this, and for what's described in today's blog post, it's probably fair to describe Colin as a hero in more ways than one.