Right now this is something I'm doing as an individual -- the project has "blessed" it to some extent (e.g., the core team said it was fine for me to call what I was providing "FreeBSD"), but it isn't "official FreeBSD" since it has local changes to make it work under EC2. At some point this will probably turn into "FreeBSD: Sold by The FreeBSD Project" or "FreeBSD: Sold by The FreeBSD Foundation" (even if I'm the person actually rolling the images).

Congrats, Colin, and thanks!

We're not finished yet -- I'm still hoping Amazon will find a way to let FreeBSD run on all the instance types without any Windows tax, and I still have to tie up some loose ends up get "stock" FreeBSD running on EC2.

Still, I think this is yet another strong vote of confidence coming from Amazon. Enough to encourage me to pick up some projects that I had mothballed since AWS has become the "go to" solution for so many clients these days. With any luck, all those loose ends will be tied up long before I need anything production ready, but even just seeing this progress from "blessed hack" to "mostly official" is a strong indication that effort in this direction will likely not be wasted.

Yes, I'm certainly glad to have this. Amazon is very secretive, and while I've talked to enough people over the years to know that Amazon definitely wasn't ignoring FreeBSD, it's very nice to have something public I can point to and say "look, they really do care!"

all those loose ends will be tied up long before I need anything production ready

FWIW, even with the loose ends, I consider FreeBSD/EC2 production ready -- and I'm using it in production, both for Tarsnap and for FreeBSD Portsnap mirrors.