Sun OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Amazon Web Services opened a private beta program which started on May 5, 2008. In addition, Sun is now offering 24×7 technical support for its MySQL database running on EC2 and Linux.

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a Web service that provides flexible compute capacity in a cloud. Amazon EC2 provides on-demand computing, pay-as-you-go pricing, and integrated storage.

The OpenSolaris OS is available free of charge. With OpenSolaris OS on Amazon EC2, you pay for only the compute capacity you use, starting at 10 cents per hour (bandwidth and storage are charged separately by Amazon). You can start with as little as one small instance (currently 1.7 GB RAM, 1 virtual core, 160 GB storage, 32-bit platform) and scale up and down as your workloads and business demands change. Various types of instances of Amazon EC2 are described here.

You need an agile, scalable environment to develop new applications or test new technology. With OpenSolaris, you can take advantage of ground-breaking features:

DTrace – Makes OpenSolaris the most observable OS available with the unique ability to safely and dynamically trace complete software stacks. DTrace has the ability to observe any program without modifications, and is extensible, so it understands the specifics of environments such as Perl, PHP, and Ruby.
Binary and backward compatibility – OpenSolaris builds on the attention to compatibility which has been a foundation of the Solaris OS, striving to allow you to continue to run binaries built a decade or more ago. This makes OpenSolaris an OS you can rely on for upgrading to the latest releases.
Solaris ZFS – Nearly unlimited scalability, near disk access speeds, and extraordinary data reliability.
Open source – OpenSolaris.org is one of the fastest growing open source communities with over 100,000 registered members. And, OpenSolaris has a predictable lifecycle and support service, so you can plan your upgrade and patch maintenance.
Easy to use – A new network package management system provides a standardized way to administer additional software packages from network repositories, including patches and package dependencies.