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FWIW, while this says "Sold by: Colin Percival", the FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE images were built and uploaded by the release engineering team; my only involvement this time was to let the Marketplace team know that a new release was available. The FreeBSD project takes the issue of "bus factors" seriously, and while I started the FreeBSD/EC2 project the intention has always been that it would get handed off to the FreeBSD release engineering team; with 11.0-RELEASE we should finally have the last bits sorted out and it will show up in the Marketplace as "Sold by: The FreeBSD Project".
EDIT: Hijacking my own comment slightly, since it's at the top right now: I'm not sure why 10.3-RELEASE being in the AWS Marketplace is a story when 10.2-RELEASE, 10.1-RELEASE, 10.0-RELEASE, 9.3-RELEASE, 9.2-RELEASE, 9.1-RELEASE, and 9.0-RELEASE being in the AWS Marketplace weren't. The hand-off from me to the release engineering team has been gradual (made slower by the fact that we only get to try something new once every 6 months!) but as far as users are concerned FreeBSD has been in the AWS Marketplace for years.
How stable is FreeBSD on AWS?
Would you recommend it for production use?
Is there a suite of compatibility/performance tests that is run on AWS for each release?
How stable is FreeBSD on AWS?
The releases are completely stable. I'd go so far as to say that FreeBSD/EC2 is probably more stable than FreeBSD on native hardware, simply because you're less likely to run into weird driver issues with obscure hardware.
Would you recommend it for production use?
Absolutely. I've been using it for Tarsnap for years.
Is there a suite of compatibility/performance tests that is run on AWS for each release?
Not that I know of.
Having used both Marketplace AMIs and non-marketplace (community) AMIs, I find the Marketplace ones to be quite painful to use. I want my tools to be able to go out and get the latest AMI automatically and launch that instance, but it is basically impossible to do this with things in the Marketplace. Amazon makes you jump through a bunch of hoops as if you are paying extra for this marketplace AMI even if it is provided for free.
The nicest experience I've had is with the Ubuntu community AMIs. Ubuntu keeps a listing of their official AMIs[1] and there is a JSON api that they provide so you can fetch that information programtically.
Huh. To me, "go out and get the latest release automatically" is terrifying; you should be testing new releases before you deploy them.
It would be simple enough to extract the AMI numbers from FreeBSD release announcements though; the main reason I encourage people to use the Marketplace AMIs is that the AWS Marketplace provides useful statistics about how many instances are running.
Maybe "release" isn't the correct term. Ubuntu publishes new AMIs with the latest security patches quite regularly. When I spin up a new instance on say 14.04 I want it to boot with a fully patched kernel.
IIRC The EC2 FreeBSD applies all new security patches and reboots (if there were any) on first start.
Correct. (This behaviour can be disabled via EC2 user-data.)
Putting this here just because it's something I often find people aren't aware of and it's somewhat relevant:
If you want to run 10.3 on Google Compute engine, official images from the release engineering team are available.
Quoting the release announcement:
% gcloud compute instances create INSTANCE --image freebsd-10-3-release-amd64 --image-project=freebsd-org-cloud-dev
% gcloud compute ssh INSTANCE
Whoa - thanks! I did not know this.
Do you use this and can you say something about production readiness/stability?
Looks like this doesn't have the Windows tax...
The Windows tax went away when Amazon launched unix HVM, starting with "cluster compute" instances over five years ago. It has never applied to the FreeBSD images in the AWS Marketplace.
That's interesting, I can recall getting charged although I don't remember the details. I've never used the "official" AMIs, though, so perhaps it was because we built our own. Either way, thanks!
I think FreeBSD has been available for non-Windows Xen HVM instance types on AWS for a while now, maybe cperciva has more details on when this happened.
As soon as EC2 had Unix HVM instances. So every new instance type launched from 2011 onwards.
Vultr.com is FreeBSD friendly, and dirt cheap. They are different in that you can upload an ISO of any OS you want. I was able, for example, to try out DragonFlyBSD this way. No association other than being a customer.
DigitalOcean is FreeBSD friendly too.
Was not FreeBSD already available as an image on Amazon?
Yes.
But having it on the MarketPlace make it easier to find and more "Business" friendly.
Before you had to check a list of amis on Percival site's select the right one at your region. So it was not so friendly.
Thanks to Percival for this! It is a huge step in making FreeBSD more friendly for beginners.
So why hasn't this made into an official support AMI by AWS?
What does "official support" mean?
Serious question. I've never found anyone able to say exactly what it means for AWS to "support" a platform.
I was looking at the main AMI list when you launch an EC2 instances. I am not sure if they are actually created and maintained by AWS, but at leas they show up on the main page makes me think they are "official."
Relatively low interest compared to Linux, Windows.
It says:
Available on AWS Marketplace Since: 06/06/2014
Maybe it's a new version?
10.3-RELEASE is a new version, yes. (It was released last week, but it took a week to get the new version into the AWS Marketplace. I'm still working out the kinks in the process.)
The "since 06/06/2014" is for FreeBSD 10; there's a separate Marketplace listing for FreeBSD 9, which shows "Available on AWS Marketplace Since: 11/20/2012": https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK
Correct. New version, as 10.3 only came out in the last couple weeks.
Some BSD distributions were available under "Other Linuxes" :)
Wow great news! I know that bringing FreeBSD to AWS was a HUGE PITA, so props to everyone for making this happen!