FreeBSD AWS AMI disk system

[Rafal Lukawiecki]

Pardon my ignorance, as a recent convert to running FreeBSD in AWS, but I would like to know a little more about the possibilities that regard the underlying file system of the official RE and Marketplace FreeBSD 11 AMIs.

Ideally, I would like to have the simplicity of using the official AMIs but have the option of selecting a different initial volume size (both smaller, 4-5GB, and larger), and to turn on the standard EBS encryption at the initial instance launch time. I realise that I can create my own AMIs, as I have done over the years using CentOS. Is there an easier way and one that would not require my own AMI rebuilding from my own snapshots each time FreeBSD is released?

Then there is the question of the actual file system. Have you opinions about any  performance gains, especially startup/reboot time, for OpenZFS via EBS? The usual ZFS advantages of versioning/ZFS snapshots and the ability to stream updates seem attractive to our way of running our (growing) server farm. I was just reading the current issue of the FreeBSD Magazine and I have found out that ScaleEngine use OpenZFS in their AWS set-up.

As an aside, the EFS is pretty slow—I suppose I had higher expectations, considering EBS performance. I do not think that has much to do with FreeBSD and more likely a limitation of AWS NFS, but I wonder if there is anything on the horizon that could improve it. On another note, will the >32 bit NFS log spam disappear anytime soon, ie. when is FreeBSD likely to get 64-bit handles?

Many thanks for your thoughts and my regards from Ireland,

Rafal Lukawiecki
Data Scientist
Project Botticelli Ltd