April 11, 2026
Free cloud labor or fanboy saga?
20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Job
From fan mail to “free labor” — the internet can’t decide
TLDR: Colin Percival marks 20 years on Amazon’s cloud, recounting early feedback, security pushback, and getting FreeBSD running. Comments explode over whether this was noble engineering or unpaid work for a mega‑corp, with side‑drama comparing AWS security to Azure and jokes about Amazon’s very late “trust” features.
Two decades after Colin Percival opened his Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, his nostalgic walk down memory lane sparked a comment-section cage match. He recalls jumping on Amazon’s early online storage (S3), pushing security ideas, hustling to run FreeBSD on Amazon’s rentable computers (EC2), and even nudging a famous bug-hunter toward early virtualization flaws. It reads like a founder’s scrapbook — and commenters turned it into a verdict on Big Cloud.
The loudest chorus? “Free labor for a trillion‑dollar giant.” One user flat-out called it out as corporate volunteer work, while another deadpanned, “20 years of giving love to a soulless corporation.” Others mocked how long it took Amazon to roll out “attested” EC2 — a proof-your-server-is-what-it-says feature — joking that two decades is a wild wait for trust. The tone swung between admiration for Colin’s persistence and side-eye for Amazon’s pace.
Then came the rivalry spice: an AWS-vs‑Azure (Microsoft’s cloud) showdown. One commenter argued AWS bakes in security thinking better than its rival, turning the thread into a “who actually cares about safety?” debate. Amid the snark, a nostalgia flex popped up too: someone rummaging for their 2006 signup email to claim the “I was there first” crown.
In short: one man’s history lesson became the internet’s cloud therapy session, equal parts respect, regret, and roast. Read the blog, stay for the drama.
Key Points
- •Colin Percival created his first AWS account on April 10, 2006 after the Amazon S3 announcement, preceding the founding of Tarsnap.
- •Early AWS accounts required service-by-service enablement; SQS and the Amazon E-Commerce Service API were enabled by default for him.
- •Percival highlighted a security gap: AWS responses lacked signatures, which was risky when HTTP was common; he advocated end-to-end signing beyond TLS.
- •To run FreeBSD on EC2, Percival worked with Amazon under NDA; after EC2 added support enabling Red Hat in Nov 2007, his FreeBSD account was allowlisted to publish kernel images.
- •He raised concerns about Xen’s security in March 2007 and recommended Tavis Ormandy; later that year Ormandy was credited with two Xen CVEs.