OpenSolaris on EC2

It is going to be available, but only to a few right now. Amazon is hand picking the developers that will be able to participate in the beta service right now running OpenSolaris. If you just can't stand to wait, then you can go ahead and download a distribution that will run on x86 boxes from their download site. Sun is offering paid support for about $50 per call. I am not sure how this will work out with Amazon's own SLA. This is an area where Cloud Computing is really going to have some challenges for those who are desperate for support at all levels. You might have to buy support from Amazon and Sun to meet your needs just for the server. For companies who cannot provide the expertise that is needed to ensure the technical details of their application from top to bottom, it might start to get costly on a monthly basis. I think it is obvious that Sun is going to try to meet the needs of the enterprise customers in some ways in the cloud. When Amazon and Sun open it up to the community at large, I will certainly be interested in profiling OpenSolaris against some of the Linux flavors.