Bringing FreeBSD to EC2 with Colin Percival

Colin Percival is the founder of Tarsnap, a secure online backup service. He’s also an AWS community hero. For the last 16 years, Colin has contributed to the FreeBSD project, and he led efforts to bring FreeBSD to EC2. An alumnus of Simon Fraser University, Colin has a D.Phil. in computer science from the University of Oxford. Join Corey and Colin as they discuss what FreeBSD is, why Colin started using it in the first place, how Colin is responsible for getting FreeBSD working on EC2 in the early days, how FreeBSD’s generous open source license raises other issues, what’s changed about communicating with AWS over the last several years, how Colin’s company Tarsnap makes online backups for the “truly paranoid,” how Colin turned down a job offer from Google to start his own company, what Colin’s AWS architecture looks like, why Colin doesn’t care if Tarsnap never becomes a publicly traded company, and more.
About Colin Percival
Colin is the founder of Tarsnap, a secure online backup service which combines the flexibility and scriptability of the standard UNIX "tar" utility with strong encryption, deduplication, and the reliability of Amazon S3 storage. Having started work on Tarsnap in 2006, Colin is among the first generation of users of Amazon Web Services, and has written dozens of articles about his experiences with AWS on his blog.

Colin has been a member of the FreeBSD project for 15 years and has served in that time as the project Security Officer and a member of the Core team; starting in 2008 he led the efforts to bring FreeBSD to the Amazon EC2 platform, and for the past 7 years he has been maintaining this support, keeping FreeBSD up to date with all of the latest changes and functionality in Amazon EC2.
In his spare time, Colin serves as an alumni representative on the Senate of his alma mater, Simon Fraser University, where he frequently brings a perspective from the world of startups to the ivory tower.


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