This week, IBM and Amazon announced the availability of a number of IBM web app infrastructure products on Amazon EC2.  This includes DB2, Informix, WebShere sMash and others.

The development AMI’s are available at no cost other than the normal EC2 (and presumably EBS) charges.  Pricing is not yet available for production use, but will be pay-as-you-go.

Also, if you happen to have a shelf full of IBM licenses, you can leverage these on EC2.

So, what the likely application of this?  My guess is the majority of startups are going to leverage the LAMP stack on EC2 vs. start with the IBM infrastructure.   The exception might be if you are building applications targeted towards large enterprises.  It will be much easier to sell a product built on the IBM stack to a CIO of a large corporation than one on the open source stack.

The other application is for corporations who want to move their existing applications out to the cloud.  This obviously has potential licensing implications for companies wishing to host other third party applications in the cloud, but that’s a post for another day.

Regardless, this is a big step towards  making cloud computing a mainstream, enterprise computing model.