Installing pfSense free edition into AWS
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As a hobbyist in need of a "cloud router", I can not afford the "official" Netgate pfSense instance, because as a router it very rapidly goes beyond the "cheap" $75 version. Even my dreadfully slow 1.5 megabit DSL rapidly reaches the limits of lowest tier of EC2 service if it runs 100% load for a month. (1,500 kbit/sec / 8 bits * 60 sec * 60 min * 24 hr * 30 days = 486 gigabytes/month)
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I don't know much about Amazon Web Services, but I have years of experience with physical servers and hardware, so I thought it would be easy enough to install pfSense into a virtual machine and go.
Except after digging around in Amazon EC2, it doesn't seem to work like that. I don't see a clearly obvious and direct way to spin up a blank virtual machine, open a remote console session to that VM, and then to remotely boot the ISO and install the image.
Apparently it is possible to import a virtual machine from VMWare or HyperV, and both of these can be downloaded and installed with a free license, so apparently one option is to build a pfSense community edition VM locally, and then upload that VM to an Amazon bucket.
I'm not exactly sure what to do here but I will keep poking at it.
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What is the problem with the EC2 instance?
https://www.netgate.com/docs/pfsense/solutions/aws-vpn-appliance/quick-start-guide.html -
We will not be offering any assistance with requests like these. pfSense project is directly funded by AWS and Azure sales. You don't have to use AWS if money is tight, there are plenty of VPS providers who support ISO import.