20 years on AWS and never not my job

https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2026-04-11-20-years-on-AWS-and-never-not-my-job.html

by cperciva • 3 months ago

260 66 3 months ago

He gave them so much free labor

johng• 3 months ago

This... they really owe him something, IMHO. Hell, discounted service so he can make a better margin on Tarsnap sounds good to me!

cperciva6• 3 months ago

I do have a few "free" AWS accounts! But they're for FreeBSD stuff (development, publishing official images, and FreeBSD infrastructure which Amazon hosts) -- I would never use them for my business.

I'm sure I could get away with it and nobody at Amazon would even notice, but it's the principle of the thing.

iceman28• 3 months ago

It was a different time when software was seen as something that was built together and everyone was interested in learning the best from one another.

surgical_fire3• 3 months ago

No, it was really not. His tale is from mid-2000s, not from mid-1980s.

In mid 2000s these companies were already operating in the billions and their engineers were already well compensated, and it was known.

Hell, "Cracking the Coding Interview" came out in 2008. Getting a job at those companies at the time was already something coveted because of how well they paid.

RyJones• 3 months ago

He wants to evangelize, spread, and support FreeBSD adoption; this free labor helps in this.

mlhpdx• 3 months ago

I dug up my original AWS account confirmation email from 2006 a while (years) back. Now I need to go find it again to see if I was earlier.

guardiangod• 3 months ago

I just want to contrast this article on AWS to its Azure counterpart- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242.

2 companies have functionally similar products, but behaves completely different. One company makes technical decisions with security as the fundamental principal, while for the other company, security is not a consideration.

jiggawatts• 3 months ago

That’s an unfair characterisation!

Azure engineers absolutely considered security.

They just chose other priorities: growth at any cost to catch up with AWS.

villgax• 3 months ago

That attested EC2 instance rollout after ~2 decades was a nice joke LOL

tryauuum• 3 months ago

20 years of giving love to a soulless corporation

gobdovan3• 3 months ago

The author calls it a 'joke' that Heroes are just unpaid Amazon employees, but reality doesn't become a joke just because it's funny. The asymmetry here is staggering. I find myself holding back private research because I don't want to provide free R&D for a value-extraction machine that is already efficient enough.

The author was at least dependency-driven in their contribution, but outside that kind of dependency, it's hard to justify contributing even 'in the open' when the relationship is this one-sided. Amazon in particular has done enormous damage to the economic assumptions that permissive open source once relied on. There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization.

These devs know Amazon is grabby and, at some point, the only dominant outcome their community contribution is upstream of is unpaid labor for a trillion-dollar entity that also diverts support and community engagement away from the original projects by funneling users into managed versions of the same software.

queenkjuul• 3 months ago

I'm "lucky" to not be smart enough or important enough to think about this. Regardless, i wholeheartedly agree -- at this point, anything i personally could release publicly, will either be fully open source, or completely private. And I'm only choosing open source if I'm relatively sure it's not gonna make some asshole tons of money.

gobdovan3• 3 months ago

That's in the ballpark how big corps use open source strategically. They try to kill everyone value extraction moat at any other layer than the ones they dominate. So they commoditize their complement [0]. They don't care if you make money based on their OSS, as long as you race to the bottom against anyone else who also has access to it and turn anything but the corp's profit center into a ubiquitous commodity. So they make the "asshole"'s incentives line up with their own.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

surgical_fire3• 3 months ago

There's increasingly more projects adopting 'Business Source Licenses', precisely to prevent open work from becoming a free input into hyperscaler monetization.

They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers.

The truth is that the sort of company opting for BSL never really wanted to do OSS, and in truth only did so for the optics of it, for the goodwill it buys among developers, etc.

direwolf203• 3 months ago

Or SSPL, which extends AGPL with even more sharing requirements.

graemep• 3 months ago

I know this is true of AGPL, but GPL3? I thought the people who objected to GPL3 were those distributing software to their users (e.g. was a reason Apple switched from bash to zsh). I cannot think of aything in GPL3 that would be a problem for hyper-scalers.

wasmainiac• 3 months ago

They could use AGPL or GPL3, typically those licenses are verboten in hyperscalers.

Laws are only as good as their enforcement, in business at least. Unfortunately I have seen first hand that no one cares about licensing if they can’t get caught.

Businesses licenses are good because you can offer support and other benefits to encourage payment.

noosphr• 3 months ago

The GPL3 can be put behind a server and no one will ever see the source code because there is never any distribution.

Only the AGPL is remotely close to forcing hyper-scalars to release the source code of what they provide.

djoldman2• 3 months ago

If someone doesn't like Amazon using software they write, they can just outright disallow Amazon from using it in the copywrite license.

It's perfectly legal to say: "except for Amazon [and whoever], anyone can use this for any purpose, provided..."

Amazon won't intentionally use that software. It's not worth the potential legal liability.

That doesn't mean Amazon won't write their own version though if they think they need to at some point.

gobdovan3• 3 months ago

I am saying this is exactly what's happening, but with more robust language. If you disallow Amazon, maybe there is a third party that offers our services to Amazon. So Amazon-the-string is not the bogeyman; the concern is the resale or hosted-service arrangement they can access.

So you see formulations that target infrastructure resale rather than specific entities, such as:

"For the avoidance of doubt, the following scenarios are not permitted under the license:

* A managed service that lets third party developers ... register their own [SERVICE] service endpoints and invoke them through that managed service."

"You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software."

"If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License [...] where 'Service Source Code' is defined broadly to include the entire hosting stack (monitoring, backups, etc.) to ensure a level playing field"

drzaiusx112• 3 months ago

AFAICT, large saas players can simply implement the software interfaces regardless of business source licenses like what happened to redis, no? Or is there some specific protections for API surfaces that I'm not aware of. I vaguely recall Google v Oracle almost established some protections but then got deferred in later ruling. My memory is hazy on that though...

ryandvm• 3 months ago

Indeed. And with the frontier AI models it's worse than that. You can literally just have them write test cases for the product you want to clone, then set it loose reverse engineering the code base.

That said, all these models are trained on the open source code bases presumably, so it would be interesting to see if AI-blackbox reverse engineering actually holds up in court.

ysleepy• 3 months ago

I remember many of these events as I was running FreeBSD a lot and subscribed to the mailing lists.

Why on earth would you give this monstrosity of a company so much free labour?

I get that volunteering is fun, but donating your time and competence to a hyper capitalist company is short sighted. I hope there was appropriate compensation, and I'm not including "early access".

latentframe• 3 months ago

Interesting how this history is about the edge cases and the unlikely risks that turn into real incidents. the systems scale faster than what we think about their safety.

bob1029• 3 months ago

I strongly disagree with the part about IAM roles for EC2

a useful improvement (especially given the urgency after the Capital One breach) but in my view just a mitigation of one particular exploit path rather than addressing the fundamental problem that credentials were being exposed via an interface which was entirely unsuitable for that purpose.

What alternative interface does the author propose we use to securely exchange credentials? The only other approaches I can come up with involve allowing monkey hands to come into direct contact with secret materials. Outlook, slack and teams cannot possibly be more secure than IMDSv2. I think if you are manually passing around things like PFX files you've already lost the game.

The entire point of the IAM roles is to make everything a matter of policy rather than procedure. The difference here is insane when you play through all of the edges. IAM policy management is significantly easier to lock down than the alternative paths. I can prove to an auditor in 5 minutes that it is mathematically impossible for a member of my team to even see the signing keys we use for certain vendors without triggering alerts to other administrators. I've got KMS signing keys that I cannot delete with my root account because I applied inappropriate policies at creation time. This stuff can be very powerful when used well. Azure has a similar idea that makes accessing things like mssql servers way less messy.

erincandescent• 3 months ago

Scaleway's equivalent only allows connections from ports <1024. This is cute and means only processes with CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE can retrieve the tokens.

You can do similar with vsock(7) sockets. This also has the advantage that it's harder to trick an application into making a connection to a vsock socket.

Both of these have the weakness that it is not entirely atypical to give processes CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE so they can listen on "privileged" sockets, but they work against anything without that.

Even better, you could put bootstrap credentials in DMI data or similar, where it'll end up (on Linux) inside a sysfs directory which can only be read by root.

cperciva6• 3 months ago

What alternative interface does the author propose we use to securely exchange credentials?

If you read the linked post you'll see that at the time I suggested using XenStore to pass credentials to the OS kernel. Obviously a different approach would be needed with Nitro but if anything it would be easier now.

Once the kernel had them they could be exposed to applications via a synthetic filesystem which, crucially, can have ownership and permissions set on it.

I'm absolutely not arguing against IAM Roles for EC2. I'm arguing that they picked the worst possible interface over which to transmit those role credentials.

daniel-levin• 3 months ago

Before the AI craze, there were plans to allow guests to cleave off an AWS-managed enclave and expose IMDS to only that enclave [0]. No creds would ever be visible to the guest. The enclave would function as a signing oracle. The exact interface was being bikeshod before the project was shelved in the name of geNAi lEaDeRsHiP.

[0] 86a7b126fea03dd57e6a3c9c9b7951b5318d33029cef0547ff441862174682f5 is the sha256 of the shelved project’s name

dchest• 3 months ago

Colin, if I remember correctly, you first ran Tarsnap servers on Ubuntu before you made FreeBSD work on EC2. At what point were you confident enough to switch to FreeBSD?

cperciva6• 3 months ago

I think cc1.4xlarge was the first instance I ran the Tarsnap service on. Being HVM made me far more confident -- PV dramatically increases the risk of VM/paging bugs, which is exactly the way to get silent data corruption.

So... I'd have to check my notes to be sure but I think fall 2011?

daemonologist• 3 months ago

Good domain name.

few• 3 months ago

In April 2024 I confided in an Amazonian that I was "not really doing a good job of owning FreeBSD/EC2 right now" and asked if he could find some funding to support my work, on the theory that at a certain point time and dollars are fungible
I received sponsorship from Amazon via GitHub Sponsors for 10 hours per week for a year

For whatever reason, I remember being shocked that you were only charging $300/hr [1] which was what a mere L6 google engineer would make salaried. I hope they are paying you more nowadays

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30188512

rcbdev• 3 months ago

American hourly rates in IT are truly nuts. I wonder if the value-add to hiring American is really worth it, in German-speaking EU you'd get real top-notch engineering for 120€/h. Even less further eastwards.

christophilus• 3 months ago

$120/hr gets you a very good developer in the US, too. Just not in the Bay Area or Seattle.

ignoramous• 3 months ago

German-speaking EU you'd get real top-notch engineering for 120€/h

No disrespect to German-speaking engs, but Colin isn't merely "top-notch", he's "the top".

Huge salaries (like those paid to "top" athletes in "top" professional team sports) aren't unheard of in Tech anymore. For instance, Google paid $2b+ to acquihire Noam Shazeer of c.ai back. Meta was rumoured to be paying $20m+ salaries to poach OpenAI researchers based in Zurich.

spicyusername• 3 months ago

Those pay packages are basically only on the west coast and in New York, a "small" region of the U.S.

100-200k, is what you'd expect elsewhere. Which is still pretty good, just not astronomical.

loloquwowndueo• 3 months ago

They just want to earn at least the same as a plumber.

arjie• 3 months ago

Fantastic piece of lore. Fascinating to read the journey. But also hearing some of the names here (Tavis Ormandy is famous for his role on Project Zero, for instance) and knowing that even top engineers can bomb interviews for making poor choices.

Nothing useful to add except that I Like these blog posts from someone who actually did a bunch of things. Nice round-up of the past.

anilgulecha• 3 months ago

I understand people have a viewpoint here about not giving time to large behemoths. I'll counter with a story and perhaps a larger point.

Back in 2006/7 I had an idea for a project for which, in all enthusiasm, I setup a mailing list, but ended up never pursuing it. It's a very unique name.

In 2012, another developer landed on the same name for their project, but saw that the mailing list was taken up and reach out inquiring if he could take over, and I obliged because here's another person doing something in cryptography and open source, 2 of my favorite things then (and now).

The project was "scrypt" and the developer was Colin! :) I knew nothing about Colin or tarsnap then, IIRC.

Sometimes you just do kindnesses of which you're able, with people who you feel a sense of community with, without expectation of anything commercial. Karma adds up, and it's benefits are large, though hard to always articulate.

andrewstuart• 3 months ago

I was an early adopter and huge fanboy for AWS.

At some stage I realised AWS is extremely expensive, extremely slow, extremely ridiculously complex and also a parasitic attitude to open source.

I realised I should instead go all in on Linux on virtual machines on other platforms.

AWS I’m done.

lnz_me• 3 months ago

Netflix is a big FreeBSD user and a big AWS user, do they run FreeBSD on AWS? Would be the obvious sponsor to me as they rely heavily on the infrastructure built by volunteers like Colin

tiffanyh• 3 months ago

I don’t think they do.

Netflix uses FreeBSD specifically for their custom-built CDN/streaming servers, which are hosted directly with ISPs … not on AWS. Their user-facing catalog app, however, runs on Ubuntu servers hosted on AWS.

At least that’s what I recall reading here on HN.

cperciva6• 3 months ago

Yes, that's correct. They're not idiots and realize that spinning up FreeBSD instances in EC2 can be very useful for development purposes -- the largest EC2 instances can run a buildworld very very fast -- but they have no need for FreeBSD/EC2 for their production workloads.

CoryOndrejka• 3 months ago

in fact in one of Jeff Barr's AWS user meetups in Second Life

There's so much about that phrase that makes me smile. Easy to forget that Second Life was also one of the earliest users of AWS, S3 first. Jeff Bezos had personally invested in our 2005 round (a round that made Linden Lab a unicorn before that was a thing) and pointed us at Jeff Barr and the work coming from AWS.

In return, Jeff Barr started hosting AWS meetups in Second Life -- this was the era of lots of groups setting up Second Life outposts, from Jonathan Coulton to Reuters.

MobileVet• 3 months ago

I’ll never forget seeing Second Life for the first time at a conference, in Flagstaff I think. You guys had a single folding table booth (as we all did) and computer running Second Life. Our team thought it was pretty cool and we talked about it quite a bit back at the office later. It was either 2002 or 2003.

We were with Evolution Robotics and were showing off the ER1, a new hobbyist robot.

Good memories for sure!

cperciva6• 3 months ago

Indeed, when re:Invent 2020 went virtual and we had a virtual space we could walk around I had a major sense of deja vu -- of course Second Life on a laptop was very different from wearing VR goggles.

cmiles8• 3 months ago

AWS was the clear undisputed leader for years, but feels like it’s lost its way now.

It knew how to be the market leader and first to market with big launches. It’s now struggling to navigate a world where in more and more areas it’s falling behind. The big early misses on GenAI seem to have accelerated that.

A ton of momentum from earlier years keeps it moving, but that playbook only lasts so long.

MyUltiDev• 3 months ago

A 20 year retrospective with no Hetzner or OVH numbers in sight is a bit of a tell. I run workloads across AWS, Hetzner, and a couple of smaller providers, and the gap is not subtle. For a small to medium web stack you are looking at roughly $350 a month on AWS versus 20 to 25 euros on Hetzner for similar specs, plus 20 TB of bandwidth included instead of being billed at 9 cents a gig after the first 100. What AWS actually sells at this point is not compute, it is the IAM model, the global footprint, the deep integrations, and the org chart consensus that nobody gets fired for picking it. That is a real product and worth a lot in some shops, but it is a very different product from what cloud meant in 2006. For the people who have actually moved a real workload off AWS recently, what was the part that turned out to be more painful than you expected?

electroly• 3 months ago

I had forgotten that you had to individually request AWS services early on. I checked my email history from 2007 and it's true, I was initially only granted access to "Amazon E-Commerce Service"! I got a separate email confirming that I had signed up for S3. Funny that they hadn't yet figured out that the automatic "package deal" is one of their biggest selling points.

The next service I signed up for was "Alexa Web Information Service". Web search as a service, back when "Alexa" was the search company they had acquired, not a voice assistant. By mid-2007 I was (finally) accepted into the EC2 beta. The rest, as they say, is history.

20 years on AWS and never not my job

Related Stories