Cloud Computing for the Enterprise: Part 2: WebSphere sMash and DB2 Express-C on the Amazon EC2 Public Cloud

Among the three cloud types - public, private, and hybrid clouds - the public cloud is probably the most well-known and mature in its offerings. Accessibility and affordability are two of the key characteristics that have led to the popularity of the public cloud. To these ends, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure provides a public cloud infrastructure that hosts Amazon Machine Image instances which deliver capability to users. To enable users to utilize EC2, IBM recently released Amazon Machine Images (AMI) that package some of its popular software offerings for the EC2 platform; these AMIs are available under a development license at no charge. In addition, IBM also supports specific existing IBM software running within the EC2 infrastructure.