FreeBSD now available on all EC2 instance types

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-16-FreeBSD-now-on-all-EC2-instance-types.html

by cperciva • 15 years ago

141 30 15 years ago

woodrow2• 15 years ago

cperciva: I know that some time back you said you'd signed an NDA with Amazon which prevented you from discussing what made this possible. Has that passed now? Was defenestration of Windows AMIs the secret?

cperciva7• 15 years ago

My NDA with Amazon is still in effect. I don't think it ever covered the fact that Windows AMIs could be defenestrated.

woodrow2• 15 years ago

Thanks. I had figured there was an interesting story behind the reason for which FreeBSD only ran on t1.micro instances initially, and your mention of an NDA only further piqued my interest.

calloc• 15 years ago

Any chance of getting Amazon to make these AMI's the same price as the Unix/Linux ones?

wickedchicken• 15 years ago

I've always been curious about running a pure BSD on the open net, but its very hard to find cheap VPSes which will do that (and meet my other needs). Hopefully this will pave the way for that.

getsat2• 15 years ago

I'm still looking for the BSD version of Linode. Instant, automatic provisioning and pro-rated billing.

Every BSD VPS provider I've tried so far has been lacking in interface, auto-provisioning, or have shady cancellation terms.

brndnhy• 15 years ago

http://arpnetworks.com/

I was a customer for several months and the level of service was very good. Good peering, too.

mbell2• 15 years ago

I use it on the open net all the time, pfsence is my go to for routing / security appliance fronting for additional VMs.

axk• 15 years ago

I'm a happy rootbsd customer, their prices are on par with linode.

Freaky• 15 years ago

I was with them for a few years. Reliable but slow - I don't think I ever saw more than 10Mbps in or out.

evandena• 15 years ago

I'm running FreeBSD 9 with https://hostigation.com/

Very happy.

rwboyer2• 15 years ago

I am a BSD fan - a big one in fact as I have been using BSD since the late 80's. I use AWS for some things where the pricing/instance sizes are a good match for the app needs.

I don't keep up with the latest greatest Xen infrastructure in use by Amazon but...

Wouldn't it be easier/cheaper to get NetBSD running as it has PV support for Xen3? vs using a windows HVM?

cperciva7• 15 years ago

I've talked to NetBSD people about EC2 a bit, but I don't know their current status. IIRC at one point they were limited by a lack of SMP support in their Xen-PV code, but I don't know if that's still the case.

rwboyer2• 15 years ago

I have a couple of boxes at home right now running NetBSD as dom0 w/xen3 and linux/freebsd/netbsd running as PV guests if I get a chance I will move them to some more modern HW and see what happens with NetBSD and multiple cores... Think one of them is a dual core right now but gotta check...

In any case NetBSD PV Kern on a small AWS might be a great combo for cheap BSD thrills....

mbell2• 15 years ago

I guess i don't use FreeBSD much, but my primary use of the OS is for pfsense which runs both my home router and also the routers I use for VMs running on dedicated VMWare servers.

I do know that FreeBSD's handling of network activity appears to be second to none, but given Amazon's load balancing system, I'm curious what people are actively using FreeBSD for outside this space? Particularly in regards to EC2.

SomeOtherGuy3• 15 years ago

>I do know that FreeBSD's handling of network activity appears to be second to none

It is certainly second to OpenBSD. Probably third behind NetBSD even.

cperciva7• 15 years ago

Ok, I'll bite: What do you think is wrong with FreeBSD's network stack?

wunki• 15 years ago

Thank you for your work and persistence Colin! I love using FreeBSD for my servers because of the consistency and great minds behind it. I love it so much that I have written a few posts how to setup a FreeBSD server [1].

Currently there are some other options for hosting your "virtual" FreeBSD server. Some good ones are RootBSD [2] (US), Brightbox [3] (UK) and TransIP [4] (NL). Quality wise that are equally good. I'm currently using TransIP because I'm located in the Netherlands.

Interesting to note is that the above providers make use of KVM virtualization technology. Phoronix did an interesting benchmark comparing Xen, Virtualbox and KVM. It showed that KVM was the winner on compute and disk performance [5]. Would be interesting to find out how FreeBSD performance on Amazon's XEN layer.

[1] https://www.wunki.org/ [2] https://www.rootbsd.net/ [3] http://brightbox.com/ [4] https://www.transip.nl/ [5] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubunt...

cperciva7• 15 years ago

Phoronix is infamous for its broken benchmarks. I'm sure the disk performance numbers would look completely different if they used paravirtualized disks (like EC2 does) rather than emulated disks. The compute numbers are just plain weird; on something as cache-resident as ripper it should be impossible for the virtualization system to cause any significant real effect, so I'm sure there's a problem with their benchmark or their test setup somewhere.

mrud• 15 years ago

JFTR there seem to be some issues with the Phoronix benchmark (mostly missing patches). Have a look at http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2011/11/29/baremetal-vs-xen-vs... for an updated benchmark within a PVHVM environment

antirez2• 15 years ago

What advantages FreeBSD offers over Linux so that for the next installation on EC2 one would consider running it instead of Linux? (question is not rhetorical)

cperciva7• 15 years ago

I don't think there's anything specific to EC2; so your question just reduces to "why FreeBSD rather than Linux?"

There's a lot of differences which are more matters of taste than anything else: FreeBSD's ports system, the rc.d startup system, the fact that the kernel and userland are developed in tandem rather than independently, the presence of a central SVN repository, et cetera. I like all of these, but I know there are Linux people who prefer the "Linux approach" for each of these.

Some things which I've heard even hardened Linuxites saying make them tempted to try FreeBSD, however: ZFS, DTrace, LLVM/clang (now building the entire FreeBSD base system), virtualized networking, Capsicum. Also new in 9.0, but not getting much attention yet, is journaled soft-updates -- essentially the "best of both worlds", using soft-updates for the 99% of operations which soft-updates can handle quickly and safely, and journaling the remaining 1% to ensure that a dirty fsck is fast.

clarkevans• 15 years ago

Colin, Thank you so much for your wonderful work.

I'd add that "jails" are a very cool, under appreciated feature of FreeBSD. It is especially useful for packaging up and delivering applications as a single unit. While it may seem that they are in competition to virtual machines, I think of them as being a complement.

antirez2• 15 years ago

Thank you, ZFS, DTrace, LLVM/clang, ... are the kind of stuff I was looking for to understand the non subjective advantages.

buster• 15 years ago

From what i was told, it's often considered to be more stable, more secure and faster as Linux as server OS.

Slightly on topic: http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2011/09/one-million/

1 Mio established TCP connections on a single machine is pretty good.

FreeBSD now available on all EC2 instance types

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