[talk] FreeBSD EC2 Crash Course?

[Charles Sprickman]

Hello all,

I recently setup my first EC2 instance, and that was my very first foray into “the cloud”.

I am seeing a huge mound of documentation, I am not seeing a nice list of gotchas or a good overview of things like instance storage vs. EBS vs. ephemeral storage and such.

I know there’s a few here that run things on a fairly large scale in Amazon’s cloud - I really only need a few cheap standalone instances.  My concerns boil down to:

• How to never lose my public IPs
• How to safely backup the entire instance off-site (none are over 10G)
• Swap (seriously - even something this simple has caveats and apparently if you use EBS you can rack up a huge bill if something spins out of control and hits swap hard)
• Any FreeBSD-specific gotchas beyond Colin’s notes here: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

In short, I really want to just treat this more like a simple VPS instead of a puppet-ified cloudfront sharknado monster, and I want a recovery path if I break something.

Any pointers?

Thanks,

Charles
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