---
title: "OpenBSD meets Exoscale"
date: 2015-02-17
author: "Pierre-Yves Riʦchard"
url: https://www.exoscale.com/blog/openbsd-meets-exoscale/
---
# OpenBSD meets Exoscale

![openbsd cover](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/openbsd-meets-exoscale/cover.png)

Exoscale is happy to announce the availability of an
[OpenBSD](http://www.openbsd.org) 5.6 image. OpenBSD is
a 4.4BSD based operating system focused on portability,
standardization, correctness, proactive security and
integrated cryptography.

The OpenBSD project is most famous for producing
[OpenSSH](http://www.openssh.com).

## Why does OpenBSD matter

Compared to Linux, the development of OpenBSD differs in several way.
The most glaring difference is the fact that OpenBSD produces a
complete and integrated operating system, while Linux is distributed
as a kernel with separate teams building non-kernel (referred to as
userland) components and most of the time another team bundling both
the kernel and userland components in distributions. By contrast, the
OpenBSD team produces both the kernel and userland as well as a selection
of third-party packages - *ports*.

The result is a consistent system with great attention to details, and a huge
selection of userland tools which are either specific to OpenBSD or target
it primarily such as

- *relayd*: A layer 2/3 and layer 7 load-balancer.
- *iked*: An IPSEC VPN daemon.
- *pf*: The best open source firewall.
- *smtpd*: A simple and powerful SMTP server.

And many more such as *httpd*, *ntpd*, *ldapd* and *ypldap*.
Beyond the base system you'll find your favorite software
ready to install as pre-built packages.

In addition to this selection of software, the documentation
is of outstanding quality and readily available - in man pages.

All this makes OpenBSD a great candidate for generic cloud workloads, it truly excels
in the following scenarios:

- VPN host to guard access to your other instances.
- Firewall and load-balancer for your web front-ends.
- DNS resolver and authoritative server.
- Mail gateway.

## Cloud-init support

Building on this great foundation, we added minimal support for instance
personalization on first boot, to allow you to easily orchestrate OpenBSD instances through our API.

To keep within the spirit of security OpenBSD promotes, the personalization does
as little as possible and is only performed on first boot, the following actions are possible:

- Provisioning of public keys for the root account through the `keypair` functionality of our API or our web portal.
- Setting the FQDN of the instance and adding it to `/etc/hosts`

Based on feedback from users of the OpenBSD template we will consider adding more functionality
to the `cloud-init` process as documented here: https://github.com/exoscale/openbsd-cloud-init.

We hope you'll enjoy using OpenBSD and are looking forward to your feedback.

![openbsd running](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/openbsd-meets-exoscale/openbsd-running.png)