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[abonstu]

is there any chance of you guys maintaining an Amazon EC2 AMI for pfsense?

i'd say i could probably wrangle a decent donation from my boss if this was a possibility.

there is a massive hole in the routing landscape every time i use amazon web services... they expect you to handle all the routing and firewall configuration through their web interface as well as use their (expensive) hardware ipsec tunnels.

vyatta has an AMI image but id much prefer to work with trusty pfsense!

ps. i noticed someone in the forums attempted to make one a while back but wasn't successful.

[ericab]

i second this.

[cmb]

Haven't had too many requests for it, though it's come up a couple times recently. It's like anything else with the project - it'll happen when someone is willing to put money towards it up front. Nothing against you personally but we almost never see "I promise I'll donate if/when X" money actually come in when X is done. EC2 requires custom kernel patches, so would require a complete custom build profile, possibly adjusting some of our patches to fit in with it, setting up a new VM build server to maintain it, would likely need to contract with Colin Percival (the guru of FreeBSD on EC2) for a few hours to help in some areas and verify best practices, and we'd have to pay for EC2 time. It easily would cost us in excess of $3000 USD in labor alone, and I don't see us ever able to get that back on it specifically, so at least for now I can't justify that unless someone funds it up front. There are things that are widely used that are better to put the money we have for general open source development towards.

It's a project I would consider if we at least don't lose too much money on it, don't necessarily have to break even or make anything on it. But it'll have to be close to breaking even. If anyone can justify putting close to $3000 USD into making it happen, please email me and we can discuss. cmb at pfsense dot org

Or maybe if there are enough people with smaller amounts to put towards it, a bounty could work. May want to start a thread on the bounty board.

[abonstu]

if we were to commit US$3000 up front, could i get some sort of written commitment that this 'donation' was actually going to result in EC2 support by a given date? i know it must be difficult to lock that sort of thing down but i can already see my boss rolling his eyes if there isn't some paperwork. just to confirm, this would be ongoing support for the EC2 platform right (not just a one off hacked up compile for 2.0.1)?

[dell4242]

I'm inclined to think this is a priority. Checkpoint released an amazon ami they charge $2000 . The question is do you want to own the cloud firewall space. Currently Amazon vpc won't terminate to much of anything. It won't terminate to a cisco asa, it won't terminate to a sonic wall or a watchguard. Companies need to spin up cloud firewalls for private clouds , and I'd prefer to be using pfsense rather than closed bloat ware.
If it's cash deductible I'll even throw money into the development pool.
Cheers
Nate

Haven't had too many requests for it, though it's come up a couple times recently. It's like anything else with the project - it'll happen when someone is willing to put money towards it up front. Nothing against you personally but we almost never see "I promise I'll donate if/when X" money actually come in when X is done. EC2 requires custom kernel patches, so would require a complete custom build profile, possibly adjusting some of our patches to fit in with it, setting up a new VM build server to maintain it, would likely need to contract with Colin Percival (the guru of FreeBSD on EC2) for a few hours to help in some areas and verify best practices, and we'd have to pay for EC2 time. It easily would cost us in excess of $3000 USD in labor alone, and I don't see us ever able to get that back on it specifically, so at least for now I can't justify that unless someone funds it up front. There are things that are widely used that are better to put the money we have for general open source development towards.

It's a project I would consider if we at least don't lose too much money on it, don't necessarily have to break even or make anything on it. But it'll have to be close to breaking even. If anyone can justify putting close to $3000 USD into making it happen, please email me and we can discuss. cmb at pfsense dot org

Or maybe if there are enough people with smaller amounts to put towards it, a bounty could work. May want to start a thread on the bounty board.