I have been seriously looking at using Amazon EC2 for a pet project of mine that I am working on. However to my dismay Amazon EC2 currently does not support FreeBSD running in its cloud. Apparently this is related to Amazon using version 3.03 of Xen as its virtualization software, whereas FreeBSD requires version 3.3 of Xen to run. What the technical details behind this requirement is I don’t know.
Last week, during Devoxx ‘08 in Antwerp, I got the chance to ask Simone Brunozzi, Amazon Web Services Evangelist for Europe, during his presentation on Amazon Web Services, about a time line for FreeBSD support. His answer was that there was no timeline and that they are relying on the community to provide this support. He recommended I’d have a look at OpenSolaris. I’ll certainly check it out. In fact I already installed in on my MacBook running in a VMware instance. Though I haven’t had much time yet to really dive into it.
Anyway looking for some more information regarding running FreeBSD on Amazon EC2 I came across this post by Colin Percival. In it he writes near the end:
There are still improvements which I’d like to see made to Amazon Web Services: [...] and adding support for running FreeBSD on EC2 (I’ve signed an NDA, so I can’t say much here except that we’re working on it) are at the top of my list, [...]
This is encouraging. It probably means it too late for me to use, but eventually we might get FreeBSD running on Amazon EC2!
