I often have a need for a fresh FreeBSD install, to host a server, or perhaps just experiment with. My usual solution is FreeBSD jails. However, I've recently gotten interested in Ansible and AWS.

There are quite a few advantages to installing infra with AWS, however the one I'm most interested in is automating the simple stuff and getting it right the first time. For example, remembering to:

• Add the service accounts
• Ensure that all files are added by the right accounts
• Add startup and shutdown scripts
• Configure pf
• Ensure logging is "just right"

AWS also has the notable advantage that with VPC, I can configure not only the OS and applications, but build infra.

With the help of these two pages (1,2) I've been able to provision a simple FreeBSD-12 host, in a VPC. Code is here.