Sun Moves Glassfish to the Cloud with Amazon EC2

Sun Microsystems has announced that its GlassFish Portfolio and open-source identity management offerings – OpenSSO and OpenDS software – are now available via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Sun officials said Sun's open source software infrastructure can be deployed quickly on Amazon EC2 to help easily build and secure cloud applications and enable users to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use.

This is the first step in Sun's strategy to offer its portfolio of leading open-source software on a variety of cloud platforms, including the Sun Cloud and Amazon EC2.

With this announcement, Sun customers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) will have access to the Sun open-source software infrastructure technologies they need to develop proof-of-concept and pilot applications in the cloud, including: Sun GlassFish Portfolio, an open-source Web platform based on Sun's GlassFish application server; Sun OpenSSO Enterprise, the single solution for Web access management, federation and Web services security; and Sun OpenDS Standard Edition, a next generation directory service, based on LDAP and DSML standards.

Moreover, users also can leverage the OpenSolaris operating system and Sun's MySQL database, which are already available through Amazon EC2 and will soon be available on the Sun Cloud. The availability of Sun’s open-source software infrastructure on Amazon EC2 is the first phase of a multiphased program to offer full support and indemnification for these products in the cloud, Sun officials said.

“This is a first step in a long-term plan to offer the Sun open-source software on popular cloud services, including EC2 and the Sun Cloud, said Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of MySQL and Software Infrastructure at Sun, in a statement. "Support for the Amazon EC2 environment provides another option for companies to access Sun's popular open source software technologies and can help shorten their product development and time to market. By having access to Sun software in the cloud, companies can accelerate their projects without the overhead of staging large hardware environments.”

“We are excited to be working with Sun to extend support for Sun's open source software to Amazon EC2,” said Terry Wise director of Business Development for Amazon Web Services. “We’re pleased that the combination of Amazon EC2 and Sun can provide additional options to our mutual customers as well as extend software solutions to ISVs and SIs.”

“We are seeing an increased demand for cloud services from our clients,” said Jim Guinn, II executive vice president, Partners Consulting, Solution Division. “We believe the Sun/Amazon relationship will allow us to rapidly develop proof of concepts for clients and pay for the hardware based on our specific needs. This, in turn, helps eliminate traditional operational dependencies that slow down projects and allows us to focus more on solving the core business needs of our clients.”