DigitalOcean seems to be dropping FreeBSD support | Hacker News Reader

DigitalOcean seems to be dropping FreeBSD support

52 pointshericium13 comments

from email:

> Beginning June 1, 2022, you will no longer be able to create FreeBSD-based Droplets through the cloud control panel. You will still be able to create FreeBSD-based Droplets through the API until July 1, 2022, but after July 1, 2022, only legacy FreeBSD Droplets will remain on the platform (...)

> Rest assured: Existing FreeBSD Droplets and FreeBSD Droplets created from May 1, 2022–July 1, 2022 will continue to work as usual despite these changes to our offerings.

View on HN

It would be interesting to hear from them what their reasons are, but I think it's not hard to guess: Few people use it, and it's not worth supporting.

Few folks may use bare FreeBSD but firewall solutions like PFSense or OPNSense (both built on top of FreeBSD) are quite popular with some, even corporate, users.

Agree. It also makes for a very stable web server.

I'm sure they've done the math on it and it's just not worth supporting from a revenue perspective. There must be some operational cost that became a burden.

FWIW, AWS has support for FreeBSD: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-ukzmy5dzc6nbq (also for ARM)

Does DigitalOcean still lack support for arbitrary images? I seem to recall that in the past to get an OS rather than their short list I had to pick a supported one then wipe the disk from inside the VM which was a very delicate dance.

On Linode I could script this process by building my own images in advance. I assume that you could port this process to the DO API.

https://github.com/eatonphil/linode_deploy_experimental

Blog post describing the process here: https://notes.eatonphil.com/deploying-freebsd-on-linode-unat...

You can create your own image but VMs made out of those are limited, e.g. have no IPv6 support.

Hmm, I bootstrapped a standard OpenBSD installation from a FreeBSD installation. I haven't gotten to set up IPv6 yet but planned to.

What would be hindering that, some weird encapsulation protocol or what?

I guess you will still be able to install FreeBSD manually by just directly accessing the (virtual) storage devices? That's how I install OpenBSD on my droplets. Through either FreeBSD or Linux first.

What's the reasoning behind this?

Just guessing, probably not enough customers want it to justify spending time on supporting it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com