How it Works

How it Works - For OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with the OpenSolaris Operating System offers a true virtual computing environment, where you pay for capacity by the CPU-hour. You use Web services to provision Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), load them with your application environment, manage network access privileges, and run your applications with as many instances as you need.

To use OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 you'll need to:

• Sign up for Amazon Web Services — Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Then sign up with Sun for access to OpenSolaris OS.
• Choose one of our pre-configured OpenSolaris or Solaris Express Community Edition images to get up and running quickly.
• Choose the type(s) of instances you want to run (small, large, or extra-large) and request provisioning using AMI tools. Read details on instance types.
• Start, stop, and monitor your instances with API or third-party tools.
• Customize the OpenSolaris AMI per your needs with additional software stacks and settings.
• Pay Amazon Web Services for the instance-hours, storage, and bandwidth that you use.

OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 enables you to set up and configure everything about your instances — from the operating system, software stacks, and your applications — in an AMI. The AMI is a packaged environment that includes all of the pieces you need to deploy and run your applications. You can have just one AMI, or you might have several, including Web servers, application servers, and databases. Once you create a custom AMI, you upload it to Amazon S3 for storage. Amazon S3 provides reliable, scalable storage for your AMI as well as your data storage needs.

Once you have customized and uploaded your AMI to Amazon S3, you can start the AMI on any number and any type of instance, up to 20 instances. If you need more, submit an Amazon EC2 Instance Increase request. You can monitor and stop your instance at any time.

The credit card you provide to Amazon Web Services during the sign up process will be charged at the end of each month for the instance hours you consumed and for each GB transferred into and out of Amazon's datacenters. You are not charged for bandwidth between other Amazon EC2 instances or between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Partial instance hours are billed as full hours. See details on Amazon Web Services charges and billing.