

Debian, FreeBSD and CentOS now supported by EC2 - olefoo
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/aws-marketplace-additional-operating-system-support.html

======
jballanc
For some reason I'm really getting a kick out of the notion of "FreeBSD: Sold
by Colin Percival".

At any rate, this is excellent news! I've been looking for an excuse to do
more with kqueue/libdispatch in a server setting, and this looks like just the
excuse I need. Congrats, Colin, and thanks!

~~~
cperciva
_FreeBSD: Sold by Colin Percival_

Right now this is something I'm doing as an individual -- the project has
"blessed" it to some extent (e.g., the core team said it was fine for me to
call what I was providing "FreeBSD"), but it isn't "official FreeBSD" since it
has local changes to make it work under EC2. At some point this will probably
turn into "FreeBSD: Sold by The FreeBSD Project" or "FreeBSD: Sold by The
FreeBSD Foundation" (even if I'm the person actually rolling the images).

 _Congrats, Colin, and thanks!_

We're not finished yet -- I'm still hoping Amazon will find a way to let
FreeBSD run on all the instance types without any Windows tax, and I still
have to tie up some loose ends up get "stock" FreeBSD running on EC2.

~~~
jballanc
> We're not finished yet

Still, I think this is yet another strong vote of confidence coming from
Amazon. Enough to encourage me to pick up some projects that I had mothballed
since AWS has become the "go to" solution for so many clients these days. With
any luck, all those loose ends will be tied up long before I need anything
production ready, but even just seeing this progress from "blessed hack" to
"mostly official" is a strong indication that effort in this direction will
likely not be wasted.

~~~
cperciva
_I think this is yet another strong vote of confidence coming from Amazon._

Yes, I'm certainly glad to have this. Amazon is very secretive, and while I've
talked to enough people over the years to know that Amazon definitely wasn't
ignoring FreeBSD, it's very nice to have something _public_ I can point to and
say "look, they really do care!"

 _all those loose ends will be tied up long before I need anything production
ready_

FWIW, even with the loose ends, I consider FreeBSD/EC2 production ready -- and
I'm using it in production, both for Tarsnap and for FreeBSD Portsnap mirrors.

------
cperciva
Since there's a bunch of people asking questions about FreeBSD/EC2 here, I
submitted my page on the topic separately:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4823941>

~~~
pygy_
That submission got demoted from the first page.
<http://hnrankings.info/4823941/>

I suppose it rose too fast...

~~~
cperciva
Either rose too fast or someone flagged it for some reason...

------
pestaa
From the FreeBSD product page[1]:

    
    
        Please note that for technical reasons this AMI
        only runs on high-performance (cluster & high-I/O) 
        instances.
    

Looking at Mr. Percival's other resources, other contributed AMIs don't run on
arbitrary instances, either.

Being a broke student, I wanted to put it on the smallest micro instance. What
are these technical reasons that prevent me from doing so?

In any case, thanks for the great work.

[1]:
[https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK/ref=sp_mpg_...](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK/ref=sp_mpg_product_title/189-3526635-0298104?ie=UTF8&sr=0-2)

~~~
zootm
I believe it's because the "normal". EC2 instances are paravirtualised through
Xen, whereas the types listed are hardware virtualisation. Not sure though.

~~~
sdfjkl
Used to be that only the Windows instances were HVM (thus the defenestration
hack using them to get FreeBSD onto AWS) and all the Unix ones used
paravirtualization - has this changed?

~~~
zootm
I think cluster instances are always HVM, not sure about high IO.

~~~
sdfjkl
Ah, so we could've had FreeBSD by coughing up the cash for one of those - or
was there any special porting needed for it?

~~~
cperciva
Porting was needed, but I've done it for you.

------
whalesalad
I just spent an hour installing and documenting every step of a new 12.04
deploy for my rails-powered API.

I wanted to do this on FreeBSD! I check HN mid-install of a bunch of software
and boom what do you know. Time to start over!

That being said, there seems to only be one result for FreeBSD in the
marketplace, from our bud cperciva. I'd really love to deploy a base 9.0 on a
Small.

~~~
cperciva
You can run FreeBSD on an m1.small, but it costs more (Windows license) and
isn't in the marketplace.

------
sdfjkl
Better late than never. The defenestration hack always irked me since it meant
paying for a Windows license that I didn't want to use.

------
pkandathil
Why is FreeBSD such a big deal? What advantages does it have over Ubuntu?

~~~
cperciva
Some of the common answers to that question are clang/llvm, ZFS, DTrace, pf,
superpages, geom, journalled softupdates, and capsicum.

~~~
Andys
Incidentally, some of these things work on Ubuntu: superpages, zfs, and clang.
& I wouldn't call Journalled Softupdates an advantage, more of a catch-up to
the various journalled filesystems supported by Linux.

~~~
cperciva
Journalled softupdates is much better than mere journalling.

I don't know what the current state of ZFS on Linux is, but last time I looked
it was done with a very fragile FUSE setup.

I remember hearing rants from FreeBSD VM people about how Linux did superpages
wrong, but I don't know any of the details there.

~~~
ithkuil
Actually there is a native ZFS port for linux: <http://zfsonlinux.org/>

The license doesn't allow to distribute a binary build of it, but you can
build your own rpm and deb packages and install it to your own servers.

(According to their FAQ: "In a nutshell [...] This means that a single derived
work of the Linux kernel and ZFS cannot be legally distributed."

Honestly, besides some quick tests I don't have any experience to judge how
stable it is, but definitely better than the fragile fuse setup you are
mentioning.

Anyone has more experience with it?

------
hcarvalhoalves
FreeBSD support is huge. Many thanks to Colin, who's been working on this for
quite some time.

Now we need a more agnostic EC2 platform so it can run on all instance types.
The Windows fee situation is _not cool_.

------
verelo
Amazon linux was already a variety of CentOS wasn't it? We used it where we
would use CentOS on other providers.

Very pleased this has happened!

------
ishbits
Does this mean I can get Amazon built AMIs for CentOS instead of building my
own or using untrusted community images?

~~~
olefoo
[https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-
profile/ref=mkt_bl...](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-
profile/ref=mkt_blg_jb_OSS_Centos)

"official version" sold by Centos.org

------
borplk
Can someone give me a simple comparison between the three if they are to be
used as web servers for simple sites?

------
TheSmoke
having freebsd is a great decision. i don't have a nice experience with mysql
on freebsd but for apache or nginx on serving on freebsd is a breeze.

~~~
pestaa
How was your experience with MySQL on FreeBSD different than other systems?
Were you installing from binaries or ports?

