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.
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?
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.
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.