I created my first AWS account at 10:31 PM on April 10th, 2006, drawn to Amazon S3 for secure backups. Though S3 wasn't immediately available, my account included Amazon Simple Queue Service and Amazon E-Commerce Service, the latter being the real first AWS service most people have forgotten. Back then, you had to request each new service manually.

As FreeBSD Security Officer, I quickly identified vulnerabilities. I pushed for signed AWS responses to prevent tampering, noting that requests were signed but responses weren't. When Amazon EC2 launched, I wanted to run FreeBSD on it and connected with Jeff Barr in 2007. I recommended Tavis Ormandy for a Xen security audit, which led to CVE-2007-1320 and CVE-2007-1321. I also advocated for read-only root disks with guaranteed memory wipes for instance resets.

My 2007 blog post about Eventual Consistency argued for "Eventually Known Consistency" as a better model. Despite kernel compatibility issues with Xen 3.0 preventing FreeBSD from booting on EC2, I continued providing feedback. In 2008, I joined the Elastic Block Storage alpha and discovered a collision in the SimpleDB signing scheme while building Tarsnap's accounting system. These early interactions shaped AWS security and design decisions over two decades.