A 20-year retrospective by Colin Percival, creator of Tarsnap and FreeBSD Release Engineering Lead, covering his history with AWS from its earliest days in 2006. He recounts pioneering FreeBSD support on EC2, discovering and reporting multiple security vulnerabilities (including the SimpleDB signing collision, IMDS credential exposure that foreshadowed the Capital One breach, and a Seekable OCI security issue), influencing AWS design decisions like IAM, SigV4 derived keys, IMDSv2, and UEFI boot mode support, and eventually receiving Amazon sponsorship for his open source work. The narrative blends technical depth with insider anecdotes about how AWS evolved over two decades.
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