Open Solaris takes up residence in Amazon’s cloud

The speculation about a Sun / Amazon partnership is no more. Sun has announced that it will make Open Solaris available on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service.

• Sun’s OpenSolaris OS will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) customers for free. It is in beta for now.
• Sun will provide premium technical support for MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2.

These developments are meant to address the needs and complaints of the developer community. OpenSolaris, which comes with tools such as ZFS and Dynamic Tracing (D-Trace), will be offered for free, in contrast to some Linux offerings that cost money. For instance, if you sign up for EC2 and pick RedHat, it costs $19. ZFS allows instant rollback and continual check-summing capabilities, something developers have found lacking in the EC2 platform. This OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 beta is currently available by invitation only. Some software vendors, including GigaSpaces, Rightscale, Thoughtworks and Zmanda, are already offering their solutions via Amazon Machine.(GigaOm)

If well executed, it could be huge for Sun by focusing more development on Solaris. Amazon wins either way as existing code for Solaris will now more easily take up residence in the cloud.