Zfs

For several years now, I’ve been running all my AWS instances with a recent long-term support edition of Ubuntu server, ZFS as the root file system. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was released today, so I’ve updated my Packer templates - the original inspiration for the amazon-ebssurrogate builder - to support it! Ubuntu 20.04 has some nice new features, including: ZFS on Linux version 0.8.3, Linux Kernel version 5.4, including io_uring and built-in support for WireGuard, Up-to-date compiler and runtime packages for a variety of platforms. [Read More]

Last year, I posted about how to build Ubuntu 16.04 AMIs using HashiCorp Packer’s ebs-surrogate builder. Since then Ubuntu 18.04 has been released, and the process has changed a little.

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For all applications of importance or significance, we recommend using ZFS. On bare metal servers, ZFS is king of the hill, but on AWS and Linux it is still gaining traction. Data integrity guarantees as well as features such as “instantaneous” snapshots, compression, quotas, and the ability to send/receive datasets make ZFS very compelling. In this post, we’re going to demonstrate how to build from-scratch AMIs booting Ubuntu Linux with a ZFS root file system.

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