a small report from the Amazon AWS world

The Amazon EC2 experiment with FreeBSD 13.1 on aarch64 :

Today I bit the bullet and trudged through the baffling config options
on the Amazon AWS EC2 interface to get FreeBSD 13.1 up and running. I
went with the r6gd.xlarge type instance which provides some mysterious
four core config and 32GB of memory. There is also a 237 NVMe SSD in
there but I had to search around to figure out where that was after the
instance booted up.  I did not see any way to get at the console and do
the installation myself because I would have gone pure ZFS. What I did
get was a 32GB root device thing at /dev/nda0 and the blank SSD was the
device /dev/nda1.

Performance is not thrilling.  Nope.  I am still doing a few compute
tests and also a file thrash on both the UFS and the ZFS filesystems but
there is nothing to write home about thus far. What is far more scary
about all this is the cost of network traffic which could go well past
the four hundred USD a month mark on a halfway decent busy website. My
calculations could be way off the mark however.

Not sure what else to say but I am still running some baseline tests.
Very happy to see the AMI instance offer exists for FreeBSD 13.1 on the
aarch64 platform but I have no idea what I am getting for my money. Yet.

Any questions ?

-- 
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional