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.