AWS CloudWatch Logs Agent

[Rafal Lukawiecki]

First of all: thank you Colin, and thank you all, for making FreeBSD available in AWS and the other clouds. This is my first email here, so let me briefly introduce myself and the context. I am evaluating FreeBSD in AWS as a replacement for our existing (small) AWS fleet of CentOS 7 and Amazon Linux machines that serve my company (Project Botticelli Ltd) online training business, which focuses on analytics and what is now called data science (my main profession) but used to be called data mining and just plain-old statistics.

Colin Percival has already been very helpful in giving me some guidance with regards to his configinit scripts, which I am happy to say are working well and making machine launch and teardown easy. While my three devs have been working hard on the new web front and back ends, and our app API, all of which we hope to ship in a month, it is down to me to focus on the sysadmin part of moving the server infrastructure to FreeBSD. So far, working with FreeBSD has been a pleasure and a wonderful connection to my old Unix-days' roots.

One nice AWS component is its CloudWatch Logs engine that collects streams of syslog-generated data and centralises them, with a simple but usable UI. AWS provides an automated set-up for the awslogs daemon agent, but from a cursory look at the code, although parts of it are plain Python, much of it is very Linux-focused shell script, with much regard for runlevels, logrotate etc and not immediately usable as an rc.d script.

I was wondering if anyone has hacked that script yet to run on FreeBSD or if you have any other suggestions how to help me get AWS CloudWatch Logs integrated into FreeBSD running on AWS.

Many thanks for your help and my best regards from Ireland

PS. I have posted a request on the forum for opinions regarding FreeBSD in the cloud, in case anyone is interested: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/62190/
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Rafal Lukawiecki
Data Scientist and Director 
Project Botticelli Ltd