Until now FreeBSD wasn’t capable of running on top of Amazon’s cloud platform EC2. Now Colin Percival a FreeBSD developer, a member of the FreeBSD Core team, and the FreeBSD Security Officer has managed to modify the FreeBSD Amazon Machine Image (AMI) so that it now runs on EC2. Currently FreeBSD 9.0 is supported though and only runs on t1.micro instances, it should be considered as experimental, not-ready-for-production system for now.
"…In order to work with EC2, the FreeBSD AMIs are slightly modified from what you would have immediately after installing FreeBSD from a release CD:
- The network is configured and the sshd daemon is enabled, for obvious reasons.
- SSH logins as root are enabled, but root’s password is starred out (i.e., password logins as root will fail until a password is set).
- The first time an AMI is booted, a script fetches the public half of an SSH keypair from EC2 and arranges for root logins using that key.
- Every time the the AMI boots, it prints the SSH host keys to the console in the same format as Amazon Linux AMIs do.
- The FreeBSD kernel is located on an ext2 filesystem, in order to allow Amazon’s user provided kernel functionality to work. (Everything else is on a single UFS2 filesystem.) …"