NetBSD now runs under Amazon EC2

It is with great pleasure that we officially announce the release of the first NetBSD Amazon Images for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (better known as Amazon EC2) for all currently available regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

For those not familiar with the cloud world, Amazon EC2 is an infrastructure provider. It allows you to rent virtual machines for your own use utilizing the Amazon Web Services.

Lately, Amazon has opened up its architecture to permit running third party operating systems within the Amazon cloud. Given that Amazon uses Xen as the virtualization technology of the cloud, and that NetBSD has had strong Xen support since the early days, it was a natural step to make NetBSD run under EC2.

For more information please see the NetBSD EC2 wiki page:

http://wiki.netbsd.org/amazon_ec2/

For running NetBSD AMIs, all you need is an AWS account, a browser and an ssh client.

To create and manipulate your own AMIs, or to manipulate storage, the following packages are available in pkgsrc:

• EC2 AMI tools (misc/ec2-ami-tools)
• EC2 API tools (misc/ec2-api-tools)

I would like to thank:

• Manuel Bouyer and Christoph Egger from NetBSD for their work on Xen support for NetBSD.
• Colin Percival from FreeBSD for providing guidance and help running NetBSD inside EC2.
• the entire NetBSD community for their support.

Without them this project would not have been possible.