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Comment by soccerdave | Hacker News Reader

The release notes mention good support for running on AWS. I would love to see more distributions embrace building AMIs, or at the least provide good documentation to get it running. Ubuntu probably has the best support by building AMIs for all the regions, it would be awesome to see some others do the same thing. I think this is probably an overlooked area that could provide more growth for the BSDs.

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When 5.9 was still -current, https://github.com/ajacoutot/aws-openbsd was a viable if clunky way of producing one's own AMIs. As you can see from the script, there's quite a bit of work that happens before a -current snapshot could be turned into a valid AMI.

I think this will become really useful when attached EBS volumes are properly detected by an OpenBSD system running in EC2. Right now EBS attachments are silently ignored. (Someone please correct me!)

As far as I'm aware there isnt any blkfront support in the recent changes, which would be needed for EBS.

Support for blkfront is not needed to get up and running with Xen though, so it makes sense to defer it until later and get the bootstrap going and then the devs can focus on the remaining pieces.

Not sure if it is all of them, but for example the FreeBSD10.2 release announcements lists AMIs for 9 different AWS regions, as well as images in various formats for Azure, Compute Engine and Vagrant.

And even before they were part of the official release build, there were AMIs available, built by cperciva, in multiple regions for many, many releases (7.4/8.2+/9.0+) - but you had to know where to look for the ids (or use google).

Great to see FreeBSD doing this! I knew cperciva had been building them but didn't realize FreeBSD had incorporated it into official images. That's great!

I'm excited about this too- I almost always choose OpenBSD for small, single-role servers, because it runs so well on small hardware like Soekris single board machines, and the maintenance is so low with OpenBSD that I rarely have to touch a machine again after setting it up.

It just says they will support Xen, I doubt they will provide an official AMI.

My point is that if they DID provide an official AMI then they would possibly see even more adoption. I know for myself, I am going to go with the company that provides the best support on AWS, which at the moment is Ubuntu.

OpenBSD is a project, not a company. If a company decides to build an OpenBSD AMI and support it, it's the company choice alone. The project has no such goals. This is of course not limited to a company, an individual or a group can do so too.

Hopefully I didn't come across as bashing OpenBSD because that was not my intention. I was just providing a potential users perspective.

and I completely agree, my opinion is that they are sort of short-sighted when it comes to marketing. Debian has official aws images too.

you are correct. we suck at marketing. which is OK, because the focus of the project is to produce free and quality code. any time we spend in marketing is time we don't spend in the tree.

I can live with that tradeoff.;)

Yeah, but better marketing means more money so you don't face the prospect of an electric bill that you can't pay.

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