I confess that the last time I looked at Amazons cloud, which was not that long ago, it was offering a very limited hosting service. Reviewing the Cloud over the past few days, I was very impressed with the services being provided. In the EC2 environment, Amazon will provide you with Linux or Windows 2003 servers - and you pay per hour, for what you use.

The main area that caught my attention was the number of major software companies that are offering their products in the Amazon cloud as pre build Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). For example,  you can now spin up AMI's for a number of IBM products including Lotus, DB2 and most recently a Linux image running ITM 6.2.1.

Given the recent focus on Appliances - is this the the first IBM TIvoli Virtual Appliance ?

As if the proposal was not already attractive - IBM support the transfer of existing distributed IBM licenses to the Amazon Cloud. Speaking to IBM this week - its all about ensuring customers have the same range of trusted technology within the Cloud - but licensing keeps Tivoli firmly inside the cloud, not permitting the management of systems outside.

For further info :

IBM AMI's - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/cloud.html

Licensing - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/passportadvantage/pvu_for_Amazon_Elastic_compute_cloud.html

Here's a brief synopsis of what you get - but its essentially a Virtual Appliance. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/tiv/tivolimonitoring/faq-ec2-tivolimonitoring.html

The Elastic Cloud : http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/