I’ve been the maintainer of the FreeBSD/EC2 platform for about 7.5 years now, and as far as “running things in virtual machines” goes, that remains the only operating system and the only cloud which I work on. That said, from time to time I get questions from people who want to port other operating systems into EC2, and being a member of the open source community, I do my best to help them. I realized a few days ago that rather than replying to emails one by one it would be more efficient to post something publicly; so — for the benefit of the dozen or so people who want to port operating systems to run in EC2, and the curiosity of maybe a thousand more people who use EC2 but will never build AMIs themselves — here’s a rough guide to building EC2 images.

there are still a few kinks which need to be worked out for FreeBSD to run smoothly on C5 instances. I strongly recommend that you read the rest of this blog post before you use FreeBSD on EC2 C5 instances. (Or possibly skip to the end if you’re not interested in learning about any of the underlying details.)

This leads to a question I am frequently asked: Which way should FreeBSD users launch their instances? The answer, as usual, is “it depends”. Here are some of the advantages of each option, to help you decide which to use.

The problems of the large volume of patches and their reputation for breaking things is made worse by the fact that many systems use the same mechanism for distributing both security fixes and other changes — bug fixes and new features.