Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2

Om Malik, Monday, May 5, 2008 at 6:42 AM PT Comments (7)

During our on-stage chat at Startup Camp, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz hinted at some big news involving Amazon and its web services. Today, the company officially announced:

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.

From OStatic: As Sun Microsystems’ JavaOne conference kicks off this week, the company has announced its free new OpenSolaris open source operating system. It’s available for download . The big question with OpenSolaris is how it may compete against Linux rivals, especially since it is a fully supported operating system. OStatic, our open source blog, has the details.

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

7 comments so far

May 5th, 2008
7:13 AM PT

Garrick Meinhart said:

I thought Solaris only ran on Sun hardware. What just happened here? How does IBM respond?

May 5th, 2008
8:03 AM PT

Jeffrey said:

They’ve been porting Solaris to commodity hardware for years now.

Om, it’s worth noting that using other Linux distributions like Ubuntu on EC2 costs $0.

May 5th, 2008
8:07 AM PT

Sun Sees Amazon Changes the Game Even for Hardware Vendors « SmoothSpan Blog said:

[...] by smoothspan on May 5, 2008 The announcement that Sun has partnered with Amazon to make Open Solaris available on Amazon Web Services is fascinating. It’s free, so Sun sees [...]

May 5th, 2008
5:06 PM PT

Open Solaris takes up residence in Amazon’s cloud | said:

[...] 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) [...]

May 7th, 2008
6:01 PM PT

Daily del.icio.us for May 4th through May 7th — Vinny Carpenter’s blog said:

[...] Amazon Now Serving OpenSolaris on EC2 - GigaOM - 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. [...]

May 14th, 2008
5:08 PM PT

Peat said:

I’ve been testing OpenSolaris on EC2 — it’s a mixed bag so far, but not out of line with what can be expected in a beta program. The team at Sun has been very responsive to my inquiries, and I think their fundamentals are sound, so I’m optimistic about the future.

http://peat.org/2008/05/14/opensolaris-on-amazon-ec2-review/

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