Re: New FreeBSD/EC2 AMIs: "small" flavour

On 9/1/24 17:08, Colin Percival wrote:
> On 9/1/24 16:46, Dan Langille wrote:
>> On Sun, Sep 1, 2024, at 6:26 PM, Colin Percival wrote:
>>> On 9/1/24 12:09, Dan Langille wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Sep 1, 2024, at 2:46 PM, Colin Percival wrote:
>>>>> I'm planning on adding a new flavour of FreeBSD/EC2 AMIs: "Small" 
>>>>> AMIs,
>>>>> which are the standard FreeBSD "base" images minus some bits which 
>>>>> are
>>>>> optional or generally less likely to be useful for production 
>>>>> systems:
>>>>> [...]
>>>>
>>>> I’m going to guess the main benefit is lower memory usage. Which 
>>>> means smaller instances can be used.
>>>
>>> This should have no effect on memory usage aside from the fact that
>>> getting rid of some of the large debug files will make freebsd-update
>>> use less memory.  These are all bits which are never loaded from disk
>>> aside from that.
>>
>> The goal is to improve freebsd-update?
>
> No, the goal is to avoid wasted disk space.  A t4g.nano instance costs
> $3/month and gp3 EBS volumes cost $0.08/GB/month, so if you shave off
> 4 GB of disk usage and make your EBS volumes 4 GB smaller you've reduced
> your instance cost by 10%.
>

this seems like a good idea from my POV as an admin.  Although I think 
it may be helpful to keep the AWS CLI install on boot step in some 
use-cases.  My general workflow is to use packer to build a site 
specific AMI where I install our specific configs and run freebsd-update 
then disable it on subsequent boots.  My goal in those scenarios is to 
improve first-boot time for auto-scaling.

When I do use "vanilla" AMI's its usually for a 
research/testing/debugging task so having the awscli get installed on 
firstboot would save me some hassle of having to do that by hand.  It's 
certainly not a deal breaker though, just my two bits.


-pete


-- 
Pete Wright
pete@nomadlogic.org