Musings from Colin Percival
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…
In 2021 I started publishing FreeBSD AMI IDs in the SSM Parameter Store ; this made it much easier for scripts to launch EC2 instances without needing to have hard-coded AMI IDs. (Indeed, I use this extensively in my regression testing, to launch e.g. the most recent 14.4-STABLE image.) While this is useful for scripts, it's not so useful for humans.
I've been maintaining FreeBSD in the EC2 cloud since 2012, and from October 2013 onwards FreeBSD AMIs had code to automatically download and install security and critical errata updates when they first boot. Importantly, this took place before sshd started running, to ensure instances could be launched safely even if there were OpenSSH vulnerabilities in the release, and the system rebooted after…
As most of my readers are aware, I ported FreeBSD to run on the Amazon EC2 cloud, and have been maintaining the platform ever since. Between this and my (far more recent) role as FreeBSD release engineering lead, I sometimes get a question from other cloud providers: "What's involved in supporting FreeBSD" — or sometimes, "How can we make FreeBSD on our cloud work as well as FreeBSD works on…
Amazon's Leadership Principles are famous, not just within Amazon but also in the tech world at large. While they're frequently mocked — including by Amazonians — they're also generally sensible rules by which to run a company. I've been an Amazon customer for over 25 years and an AWS customer for almost 20 years, and also an AWS Hero for 6 years, and while I've never worked for Amazon…
I've been maintaining FreeBSD on the Amazon EC2 platform ever since I first got it booting in 2010, but in November 2023 I added to my responsibilities the role of FreeBSD release engineering lead — just in time to announce the availability of FreeBSD 14.0, although Glen Barber did all the release engineering work for that release. While I receive a small amount of funding from Antithesis…
Ten years ago I wrote that it would require someone smarter than me to extract information from the way that Tarsnap splits data into chunks. Well, I never claimed to be the smartest person in the world! Working with Boris Alexeev and Yan X Zhang, I've just uploaded a paper to the Cryptology ePrint Archive describing a chosen-plaintext attack which would allow someone with access to the Tarsnap…
As an AWS Hero I get free admission to the AWS re:Invent conference; while it's rare that I'm interested in many talks — in previous years I've attended "Advanced" talks which didn't say anything which wasn't already in the published documentation — I do find that it provides a very good opportunity to talk to Amazonians. While I'm sure many of the things I ask for get filed under…
There has been a lot of talk about AI recently, and one particular point has received sigificant attention in the tech industry: The cost of training models. According to some insiders — and the market capitalization of NVIDIA — the computing power needed for AI training threatens to upend the entire semiconductor industry. This should not be a surprise: Generalist AI doesn't scale.…
I just announced the availability of FreeBSD 13.3-RC1 . This is the first release candidate of FreeBSD 13.3, and if no further issues are reported will be the only release candidate; I would like to start 13.3-RELEASE builds on Friday, with (allowing time for mirrors to update) the release announcement going out on the following Tuesday (March 5th). This means there's a few days for people to do…