OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2: Information and News: Signup for news on OpenSolaris AMIs

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Technical Support Team

Description:

Sun Microsystems Inc. is pleased to announce the release of Hardened OpenSolaris 2008.11 on Amazon EC2's cloud computing service. This 32-bit AMI gives you the power and security of OpenSolaris combined with the flexibility of Amazon's cloud computing service, and is optimized for for Amazon EC2's cloud computing environment.

The OpenSolaris system configuration has been adjusted to comply with the recommendations published by Sun and the Center for Internet Security, a non-profit organization charted to develop and encourage widespread use of security configuration benchmarks developed through a global consensus process involving participants from academia, industry and government. 

Working together for more than six years, Sun and the Center for Internet Security have consistently developed best-in-class, supportable and complete security hardening guidance for the Solaris operating system.

The latest version developed for the Solaris 10 operating system was completed with substantial contributions from Sun, CIS, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), as well as the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

Building upon this foundation, Sun and the Center for Internet Security collaborated to adapt the security recommendations published in the Solaris 10 Benchmark to the OpenSolaris operating system and document those changes specific to virtual machine images such as those available on Amazon EC2. 

All of the specific changes made to the base OpenSolaris 2008.11 AMI are discussed on the Sun OpenSolaris AMI Hardening Wiki : http://wikis.sun.com/display/ISC/OpenSolaris+AMI+Hardening

For more information on the Center for Internet Security's Solaris 10 Benchmark, see:
http://www.cisecurity.org/bench_solaris.html

The root file system is ZFS in this AMI and includes the pre-installed packages and tools necessary to get started with using OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2. You can obtain more details about the OpenSolaris project at http://www.opensolaris.org.

Also, just like in our previous AMIs, the "pkg image-update" command updates the kernel and ramdisk which is not allowed in Amazon EC2. Therefore, in order to prevent your instances from becoming non-compatible with the Amazon EC2 environment, we have disabled this command.

More details including re-bundling instructions can be found in the Getting Started Guide.


Support:

For technical support during the Beta period, please contact ec2­-solaris­-support[AT]SUN[DOT]COM.

Please check OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 blog for latest updates and new information about OpenSolaris AMIs.

The "OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 Getting Started Guide" is located at:
http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/amazon/Sun_AmazonEC2_GettingStartedGuide.pdf

Register for OpenSolaris AMIs here.