Hosting Provider -- FreeBSD Jail Isolation for Multi-Tenant Infrastructure
Challenge
Regional hosting provider running customer workloads on shared Linux servers with container sprawl. No hard isolation between tenants, recurring noisy-neighbor problems, and a security incident where one compromised account accessed another tenant's data.
Solution
- Migrated infrastructure to FreeBSD with jail-per-tenant isolation
- ZFS datasets per jail with quota enforcement and snapshot scheduling
- VNET jails with per-tenant network stacks and pf firewall rules
- Automated jail provisioning via shell scripts and ezjail
- Resource limits via RCTL for CPU, memory, and disk I/O per tenant
- Centralized log aggregation from all jails to host system
Outcome
Financial Services Firm -- FreeBSD Security Hardening for PCI Compliance
Challenge
Fintech company processing payment data needed PCI DSS Level 1 certification. Existing Linux infrastructure had inconsistent security controls, shared root access across services, and no formal network segmentation or audit logging.
Solution
- Rebuilt production environment on FreeBSD with jail isolation per service
- pf firewall with strict ingress/egress rules and network segmentation
- ZFS encryption for data at rest across all storage pools
- Centralized audit logging via FreeBSD audit(4) framework
- SSH key-only access with MFA enforcement and per-user jails for admin access
- Automated FreeBSD security patch pipeline via freebsd-update and custom scripts
- securelevel(7) configured to prevent kernel module loading in production
Outcome
Media Company -- ZFS Storage Architecture for Content Delivery
Challenge
Digital media company storing 80TB+ of video and image assets on a legacy NAS with no redundancy. Regular data corruption, 6-hour backup windows causing performance degradation, and no point-in-time recovery capability.
Solution
- Designed FreeBSD storage servers with ZFS mirror+stripe (RAID10) pools
- ZFS snapshots every 15 minutes with 30-day retention via automated rotation
- ZFS send/receive replication to offsite backup server
- L2ARC SSD caching for frequently accessed media assets
- ZFS compression (lz4) reducing storage footprint by 35%
- nginx serving directly from ZFS with sendfile optimization
Outcome
University Research Lab -- bhyve Virtualization for Compute Workloads
Challenge
University research department running compute workloads across a mix of aging VMware ESXi hosts with expired licenses. Researchers needed Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD VMs on demand, but the budget for commercial hypervisor licensing was eliminated.
Solution
- Migrated to FreeBSD hosts running bhyve hypervisor -- no per-socket licensing
- ZFS-backed VM storage with per-VM datasets and snapshot-based cloning
- vm-bhyve management framework for simplified VM lifecycle
- VNET bridging for VM network isolation with pf traffic shaping
- Automated VM provisioning scripts for researcher self-service
- CARP failover between two physical hosts for high availability
Outcome
E-Commerce Platform -- nginx Performance Tuning on FreeBSD
Challenge
High-traffic e-commerce site on Linux serving 15K concurrent connections. Frequent 502 errors during flash sales, PHP-FPM worker starvation, and TLS handshake latency exceeding 200ms. The team was considering expensive CDN upgrades.
Solution
- Migrated web tier to FreeBSD with kqueue-optimized nginx build
- Tuned FreeBSD kernel: increased kern.ipc.somaxconn, net.inet.tcp.sendspace/recvspace
- nginx worker_connections tuned to 8192 with accept_mutex off
- PHP-FPM pool tuning with dynamic process management and ondemand fallback
- TLS session tickets and OCSP stapling for sub-50ms handshakes
- ZFS-backed static asset serving with ARC caching
Outcome
Every FreeBSD engagement is different. We tailor our approach to your specific infrastructure challenges, performance requirements, and security posture.
These case studies represent a sample of our FreeBSD work. Schedule a consultation to discuss how FreeBSD can solve your infrastructure challenges.