Earlier this year I talked about our partnership with IBM and their commitment to the creation of licensing models that are a good match for dynamic cloud-computing environments. At that time we released a set of development AMIs (Amazon Machine Images), giving you the ability to create applications using IBM products such as DB2, WebSphere sMash, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Web Content Management, and Informix.
The response to our announcement has been good; developers, integrators, and IT shops have all been asking us for information on pricing and for access to the actual AMIs. We've been working with IBM to iron out all of the details and I'm happy to be able to share them with you now!
Starting today you now have development and production access to a number of IBM environments including:
- Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Express - starting at $0.38 per hour.
- Amazon EC2 running IBM DB2 Workgroup - starting at $1.31 per hour.
- Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Express - starting at $0.38 per hour.
- Amazon EC2 running IBM Informix Dynamic Server Workgroup - starting at $1.31 per hour.
- Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere sMash - starting at $0.50 per hour.
- Amazon EC2 running IBM Lotus Web Content Management - starting at $2.48 per hour.
- Amazon EC2 running IBM WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Lotus Web Content Management Server - starting at $6.39 per hour.
These prices include on-demand licenses for each product. The AMIs are available in the US and EU regions, but you currently can not use Amazon EC2 running IBM with Reserved Instances. However, if you already have licenses from IBM you can install and run the software yourself and pay the usual EC2 rate for On-Demand or Reserved Instances. You can, of course, use other EC2 features such as Elastic IP Addresses and Elastic Block Storage.
You can find the IBM AMIs in the AWS Management Console's Community AMI List (search for "paid-ibm"), or you can search for "paid-ibm" in ElasticFox.
Because products like the WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Lotus Web Content Management Server can now be accessed on an hourly basis, you can now think about deploying them in new ways. If you are running a big conference or other event, you can spin up an instance for the duration of the event and only pay a couple of hundred dollars. If you need to do more than one event at the same time, just spin up a second instance. This is all old-hat to true devotees of cloud computing, but I never tire of pointing it out!
Each AMI includes a detailed Getting Started guide. For example, the guide for the WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Lotus Web Content Management Server is 30 pages long. The guide provides recommendations on instance sizes (Small and Large are fine for development; a 64-bit Large or Extra Large is required for production), security groups, and access via SSH And remote desktop (VNC). There's information about entering license credentials (needed if you bring your own), EBS configuration, and application configuration. The guide also details the entire process of bundling a customized version of the product for eventual reuse.
Additional information on products and pricing is available on the IBM partner page.
And there you have it. With this release, all of the major database products — Oracle, MySQL, DB2, Informix, and SQL Server — are available in production form on EC2.
