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.

To be fair Sun’s Scott McNealy has been talking up the cloud computing concept since the early days of the internet. Unfortunately, Sun never really did much to convert the lofty idea into a service for the masses like Amazon has. Recently Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted that a deal between Sun and Amazon having to do with cloud computing services is on the horizon. Perhaps by teaming with Amazon, Sun can finally realize McNealy’s dream.

When I asked him about Sun — and cloud computing especially — in light of the recent trend in which startups now have more of an affinity with Amazon Web Services than Sun, Schwartz replied with a question: “Do you think it would make sense for us to partner with Amazon to offer free info on the cloud?” I guess, I said. “Then you’ll be paying attention to the announcement we make tomorrow with what we’ll be doing with Amazon.”

He pointed out that Amazon has done a great job of evangelizing the whole notion of cloud computing, and of bringing infrastructure as a service to startups. “Amazon knocked the ball out of the park,” he said. For Sun, the opportunities are with mid-size and large corporations — like banks, pharma and financial companies — that need to build their own clouds because they cannot use Amazon type on-demand computing due to certain legal and regulatory limitations. (GigaOm)