[nycbug-talk] Cloud Providers with FreeBSD

[Pete Wright]

On Aug 20, 2010, at 3:22 PM, Matt Juszczak wrote:

> Hi folks,
> 
> I'm curious to know if anyone knows of any good Cloud server providers that support FreeBSD.  The two that I am most experienced with, Rackspace Cloud and EC2, do not natively support FreeBSD (I assume this is because of the Xen compatability issues).  Terremark does, but isn't an option for me.
> 
> I currently have a few boxes at rootbsd.net, which works great, but isn't really an advanced Cloud provider - server launches aren't instant, and there's no API.
> 
> Thanks for any input!  I may end up going with Linux CentOS on Rackspace Cloud for now (though some people have mentioned that other distributions are more related to the FreeBSD type of thinking and have the ports collection?).


i know this is not directly related to what you are looking for.  but i think there are two possible solutions.  IIRC there was some work to get linux KVM virtualization to support FreeBSD, if that is indeed still happening the perhaps you could find a "cloud" vendor who supports KVM - which I think is a "better" virtualization method for linux anyway...

on a related note, if you feel like rolling-your-own cloud I think eucalyptus supports VMware, but only on their commercial product:

http://www.eucalyptus.com/

I have done some research into these guys a while back and it looks pretty promising.  I guess their thing is that they have created a amazon ec2 compatibility layer.  so one could take ec2 created AMI's and run them on eucalyptus.

anywho, if anyone has a ton of money they'd like to throw at a *BSD friendly cloud startup give me a call b/c this might be a fun project :)

-pete

ps -> oh, looks like free and openbsd are supported as guests on a kvm hypervisor:
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Guest_Support_Status