Sun and Amazon Web Services opened a private beta program starting on May 5, 2008. Approved beta users get access to OpenSolaris™ operating system (OS) at http://www.opensolaris.org/ on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 is an Amazon Web service that incorporates hardware virtualization technologies based on the Sun™ xVM software and the Xen open source community work. Information about Amazon EC2 is located at: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2

The Amazon EC2 AMI tools are command-line utilities to help bundle an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), create an AMI from an existing machine or installed volume, and upload a bundled AMI to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).
AMI Tools can be downloaded from: http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/ connect/entry.jspa?externalID=368&categoryID=88.
The Amazon EC2 API command line tools serve as the client interface to the Amazon EC2 Web service. These tools are employed to register and launch instances, manipulate security groups, and more. The tools are the primary interface to Amazon EC2 services.

This section describes how to setup the necessary tools/utility with the appropriate version, including environment variables that are needed for establishing a connection to Amazon EC2 services.

In order to access the Amazon EC2 environment, it is required to have an SSH client and appropriate Java™ Runtime Environment (JRE) software. This guide was developed using Solaris clients - for other clients (for example, Windows or Linux), refer to the Amazon EC2 Web site. If using a Solaris client to access the Amazon EC2 Web Service, an SSH client is already installed. If using a Solaris 10 system as client, the appropriate Java runtime is already installed as well.
Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable as shown below (which might vary depending on the shell).

Download pdf OpenSolaris Operating System Getting Started Guide For Amazon EC2