Help Yourself to Some OpenSolaris on EC2

In the maelstrom of preoccupations that kept me awake last night, self-service in the cloud was a strangely prominent theme. A sad commentary on my slumber time, I know, but it was eerily coincident with news of OpenSolaris freed from a special registration process - when I woke this morning I found this announcement in my Inbox:

News Flash for Our OpenSolaris 2008.11 on Amazon EC2 Users!

We are happy to inform you that the latest OpenSolaris 2008.11 Base AMIs on Amazon EC2 in the US and Europe are now available to you and your users with no registration required! Please stay tuned for more OpenSolaris 2008.11 AMI stacks coming soon for you to quickly access. The registration process for pre-OpenSolaris 2008.11 AMIs is still in effect.

For your reference, here are the AMI IDs:
OpenSolaris 2008.11 (US) 32-bit AMI: ami-7db75014
OpenSolaris 2008.11 (Europe) 32-bit AMI: ami-6c1c3418

To read about what's new in OpenSolaris 2008.11, please visit the OpenSolaris Web site.

OpenSolaris on EC2 had been available for months, but it was cloistered behind a registration process that involved waiting for a human to get back to you with approval of your request. But no more. Now OpenSolaris on EC2 is a first class citizen with all the other *nix and Windows distros, available self-service to anyone with an AWS account.