Colin Percival, Founder of Tarsnap
Vancouver, Canada
Hero since 2019
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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What is the AWS Heroes Program?
The AWS Heroes program recognizes a vibrant, worldwide group of AWS experts whose enthusiasm for knowledge-sharing has had a real impact within the community. Heroes go above and beyond to share AWS knowledge via social media, blog posts, videos, open source projects, events, user groups, and more.