FreeBSD on Amazon EC2
Colin Percifal announced back in December 2010 that he had managed to make FreeBSD run on Amazon EC2. There were some quirks and some work-rounds needed, but it worked.
FreeBSD ran only on the ‘small t1.micro’ instance, but it wasn’t working on the ‘cc1.4xlarge instances’ (8 cores of 2.93 GHz Nehalem, 23 GB of RAM, two 840 GB disks). Colin announced that this is now working: FreeBSD Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute.
Personally, I don’t like the idea of keeping any (personal) data and files in the Cloud, but it’s great news that FreeBSD runs on Amazon EC2. After all, FreeBSD is lean, agile and flexible, so it should be able to run on almost anything.
The Cloud
The following are some links to recent events showing how unreliable and insecure cloud providers can be.
- Days-Long Gmail Outage Leads To Fury, Frustration, Mistrust
- Amazon EC2 Outage Shows Risks of Cloud
- Amazon EC2 goes down, taking with it Reddit, Foursquare and Quora
- Dropbox Lack of Security or Dropbox: Insecure by Design?
- Dropbox Will Hand Over your files to the Feds if Asked
- Tarsnap critical security bug
Though these issues, vulnerabilities and problems have been dealt with and fixed (esp. the Tarsnap problem was handled very well), trusting and relying on ‘the cloud’ should be a decision that is well considered. Even Tarsnap, a service run by Colin, a highly regarded FreeBSD security specialist, had a security problem!
No company, however big it is, however much knowledge and experience they have, is able to offer 100% uptime and guarantee 100% data security.
Private Clouds could be the golden middle way, e.g. ownCloud, OpenStack, Eucalyptus. Cloud technology but run and managed within a / your company.
Related posts:
- Here Comes the Cloud – BSD Magazine (April 2012)
- CloudSigma launches FreeBSD 8.1 and ZFS in the Cloud
- FreeBSD quick news: Amazon EC2, OpenBSD and FBI
- pfSense private cloud, and pfSense jobs
- FreeNAS videos, FreeBSD on Amazon EC2 and Intel GPU FreeBSD driver update
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I would think that by using cloud technology locally defeats the purpose of cloud computing which is outsourcing the expense and expertise of running your own cloud infrastructure?
“Personally, I don’t like the idea of keeping any (personal) data and files in the Cloud, but it’s great news that FreeBSD runs on Amazon EC2.”
How could you sustain a blog (freebsdnews.net) if you don’t like the idea of keeping any data on INTERNET? The only difference between the “Cloud” infrastructure and the normal hosting services is that on Cloud concept the infrastructure is sold as a service (IaaS), and in this case the end user of this service is a sys admin.
I’m just trying to understand if your concern is about the concept as a whole or the idea of hosting files on the internet itself.
I was more meaning keeping personal files and documents in the cloud, e.g. having spreadsheets with personal and financial info on Google Docs or any other service.