Creating you own FreeBSD ami in EC2

I'm running XVM on my laptop. XVM has got FreeBSD installed with all the required ports to run APACHE/PHP.

I want this .vdi file to be imported into an EC2 instance.

• Is it possible to import a virtual OS to Amazon EC2?
• If yes, does it get all the libs installed and DBs created or just OS?
• Could somebody please share pointers/hints on how to do this!

Any help is much appreciated :)

Solution 1:

Short answer, no – you should use one of the available AMI's for FreeBSD. Each signed release announcement (e.g. 11.2R) has the list of AMIs for each region. If you prefer to run a STABLE or CURRENT snapshot, subscribe to the freebsd-snapshots mailing list (low volume) and find the AMIs in each snapshot announcement (e.g. stable/11 from mid-September 2018).

Prior to appearing in those locations, you would have found status on Colin Percival's site. Colin is the driving force behind getting FreeBSD working well on EC2.

Use one of the project-supplied AMIs and customize it.

Solution 2:

Just in case here are some scripts to create a FreeBSD + ZFS on root:

https://github.com/fabrik-red/images/blob/master/fabrik.sh

Or you can just use the image: https://github.com/fabrik-red/images/releases

More about it can be found in https://fabrik.red