Yesterday, I let myself get optimistic about what Jonathan Schwartz coyly hinted about over the weekend.

The actual announcement came today.  OpenSolaris will be available on EC2. Honestly, I'm not sure how relevant that is. Are people actually demanding Solaris before they'll support EC2?

There is a message here for Microsoft, though. The only sensible license cost for a cloud-based platform is $0.00 per instance. 

Addendum

I said that OpenSolaris would be available on EC2. Looks like I should have used the present tense, instead.

$ ec2-describe-images -a | grep -i solaris
IMAGE	ami-8946a3e0	opensolaris.thoughtworks.com/opensolaris-mingle-2_0_8540-64.manifest.xml	089603041495	available	public		x86_64	machine	aki-ab3cd9c2	ari-2838dd41

Yep, ThoughtWorks already has an OpenSolaris image configured as a Mingle server.

(I've said it before, but there's just no need to pay money for development infrastructure any more.  Conversely, there's no excuse for any development team to run without version control, automated builds, and continuous integration.)

Permalink