TrueNAS in AWS - a new hybrid cloud option

morganL

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Hello TrueNAS and FreeNAS Community,

Do you need a NAS instance in the cloud? Would a free one be better?

With TrueNAS 12.0 BETA now released, the iX engineering team is ready to test out TrueNAS CORE in AWS. The software is unchanged, but there was some AWS-specific tooling needed to create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) which can run on an AWS EC2 instance.

So why run TrueNAS in AWS? Well, some users don’t have any physical infrastructure or locations. Others have limited infrastructure and want a backup or DR site. TrueNAS in AWS simplifies the building of a hybrid cloud.

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The TrueNAS CORE AMI runs any EC2 instance and then attaches to EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes which look like “drives”. However, unlike real drives, EBS volumes are expensive and reliable. So, generally, the TrueNAS instance would just use a single EBS volume or stripe across several EBS volumes. You can even build a Fusion Pool (SSDs and HDDs mixed).

All the standard ZFS services like snapshots, clones, replication, compression, and dedup can be used to reduce the costs of AWS infrastructure.

TrueNAS can then provide SMB, NFS, iSCSI, Plugin, and ZFS replication services to other EC2 instances or to other TrueNAS systems or clients. You will have to workout how to set up VPNs and network security. With TrueNAS 12.0 there are options to use the integrated OpenVPN services.

TrueCommand 1.3 can manage these TrueNAS instances via any VPN setup. In the future, there is a plan to simplify and automate that with a TrueCommand Cloud capability.

For those with security needs, TrueNAS 12.0 provides dataset encryption. You can even replicate encrypted datasets and zvols from an on-premises system via ZFS replication. This can be done without ever putting the security keys in AWS.

If you want to try out TrueNAS in AWS, then visit the TrueNAS CORE download page and instead of downloading TrueNAS CORE, just download the AWS instructions which include the location of the current AMI images. Once the TrueNAS instance is operating, software can be updated from the web UI and you can back it up to S3 or an on-premises TrueNAS.

If you need help with building a hybrid cloud infrastructure, please contact iXsystems. If you try out the TrueNAS AMI, respond to this post and provide us your feedback.
 
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A neat choice as an off-site backup. As someone who never worked with AWS before, is the pricing decent?
 

Samuel Tai

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morganL

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Did you mean to say EBS volumes are expandable and reliable?

EBS volumes are both expandable and expensive. The typical price is 4.5c per GB per Month = $45 per TB per month = $2700 per TB for a 5 year life.

HDDs are about $25 per TB for a a 5 year life...plus another $50 per TB for power = $75 per TB. Add RAIDZ and its $100/TB.

Clouds offer a lot of "services" and convenience, but they are expensive compared with the component costs. Use their resources wisely and don't mirror the EBS volumes.
 

Juan Manuel Palacios

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A neat choice as an off-site backup. As someone who never worked with AWS before, is the pricing decent?

I essentially ran an equivalent hand-built solution like this on AWS for about a year, comprised of an EC2 free-tier instance (small, micro, don't really recall) running raw FreeBSD, SSH, and a zpool (*) on a 1TB EBS volume (cheapest tier), and IIRC it ran me for about $30/month, which I decided would in fact become too expensive for me if my cold storage needs ever grew beyond 1TB, which they did.

But, other than that, it was pretty simple to set up: simply configure the SSH service on your AWS instance to your liking, and set FreeNAS to replicate to that target. The only moments I ever needed to bump the EC2 instance beyond the free tier is when I messed with my local data too much (e.g. Apple's TimeMachine deciding it needed to recreate my Mac's FreeNAS-hosted backups from scratch) and the resulting incremental replication stream required more RAM than available. But once that was done I'd simply downgrade back to the free EC2 tier and reattach the pool and be done with it, so 99% of the time I was only paying for the EBS.

Now I'm running my off-site backups to Wasabi, but with a bill circling $50/month it may be time to go back to the unparalleled convenience of replicated ZFS snapshots, even if AWS-based solutions in fact turn out to not be as cheap as initially hoped for. And with the sugar on top of cloud-based TrueNAS, a little hard to resist.

* For reference, this is essentially what rsync.net does, but on their own data centers and hardware (iXsystem servers, no less), and I built my own solution to try to improve upon their prices.
 

ara1307

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Hello, currently there are 3 identical AMIs in a Community section:

truenas-12.0-beta1 - ami-0047f66e620bbad59
truenas-12.0-beta1 - ami-0606b339dd150b0c0
TrueNAS-12.0-BETA - ami-0b29297d20ee25b3a

Could you clarify which one is the officially supported one? Thanks.
 

morganL

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All should work... we recommend using the AMI and then updating to the latest version... 12.0-U6.1.
 

ara1307

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Hello, is it possible to upload AMI enabled for "ENA"? Otherwise it works only for instances of the previous generations (t1, t2), t3 and many others are not supported. Thanks.
 

morganL

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Thanks @ara1307 .. can you add a suggestion via jira "report-a-bug". It may be that we do this in SCALE since there are a few of Linux compatibility in AWS. Are you OK with using SCALE for future deployments?

Let us know if you have success with the current version on the older EC2 instances.
 

ara1307

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The current version on older EC2 instances works pretty neat. I just don't want to invest any time into it as I feel like it will be discontinued in favor of a SCALE version soon. For SCALE I can't find any basic tutorials nor any AMI\Docker images yet. Could you help with that? Thanks.
 

morganL

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The current version on older EC2 instances works pretty neat. I just don't want to invest any time into it as I feel like it will be discontinued in favor of a SCALE version soon. For SCALE I can't find any basic tutorials nor any AMI\Docker images yet. Could you help with that? Thanks.
TrueNAS SCALE will be an AMI... but only after it has reached RELEASE quality. In the meantime developers can build their own AMI. Users are recommended to use CORE and then sidegrade the data to SCALE at a later post-RELEASE date.
 

Juan Manuel Palacios

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Hello, currently there are 3 identical AMIs in a Community section:

truenas-12.0-beta1 - ami-0047f66e620bbad59
truenas-12.0-beta1 - ami-0606b339dd150b0c0
TrueNAS-12.0-BETA - ami-0b29297d20ee25b3a

Could you clarify which one is the officially supported one? Thanks.
I used a regular FreeBSD image on a AWS ec2 instance, which I then upgraded through the freebsd-update command over the years, nothing different in any way from what you'd do with any other regular FreeBSD server, whether on metal or virtualized.

I'm back again to hosting my zpools on a new AWS-hosted ec2 FreeBSD server, but now upgraded to FreeBSD 13 because TrueNAS 12 is using OpenZFS 2, and expects that on the receiving end, and any FreeBSD < 13 will fail to parse the 'zfs receive' arguments that TrueNAS hardcodes.
 

delwin

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TrueNAS SCALE will be an AMI... but only after it has reached RELEASE quality. In the meantime developers can build their own AMI. Users are recommended to use CORE and then sidegrade the data to SCALE at a later post-RELEASE date.
Does anyone know if TrueNAS SCALE as an AMI yet, what the AMI ID's are and in which region these are hosted?
I've scoured all regions and cannot find any TrueNAS AMI :/
 

morganL

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Does anyone know if TrueNAS SCALE as an AMI yet, what the AMI ID's are and in which region these are hosted?
I've scoured all regions and cannot find any TrueNAS AMI :/

Bluefin is scheduled to be an AMI, but next year. You can build your own image with Bluefin if you wish.
 

morganL

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