We have a project which needs to take advantage of some ZFS features (snapshots, streaming, etc) but we're a little concerned with the recent events with Oracle and OpenSolaris. Is it "safe" to use the current OpenSolaris images on EC2?
We're considering whether it would be "safe" to use OpenSolaris in production on EC2 until an alternative BSD or Linux distro with native ZFS support becomes available on EC2. I understand that there are a number of OSol clones in the works, and that FreeBSD may become available soon on EC2.
By "safe" I mean that the current OpenSolaris AMIs on Amazon are stable enough for production use and that there's little/no chance Amazon will pull those AMIs in the near future.
Due to the open-source license it was released under, the existing OpenSolaris remains safe to use. However, you should not expect any patches or bugfixes, so it is not recommended to use OpenSolaris for production systems. Have a look at the Indiana Project and Illumos kernel as a potential upgrade path. (See Wikipedia)
I'm not sure if Amazon have AMIs for Solaris Express yet, but that may be the direction you want to go for a commercial product. There might be licensing costs involved though.
If you are only requiring ZFS and not other Solaris features, you could also migrate to Linux as OS. IBM developerWorks has a pretty good article on using ZFS on Linux even though setup seems to be rather technically intense.
If you are depending on the features, you might give Linux with btrfs a try, it also supports snapshots, streaming and the likes.
OpenSolaris is dead, Oracle killed it :(
Although Solaris Express have not been discontinued, so you can use that if you want, although the license is pretty limiting.
Safe unless Amazon decides to cut you off like WikiLeaks without prenotice. This way you will lose all your data and possibly customers.
OpenSolaris should be as stable distro as any but alas no longer supported. For PC hardware there are so many choices, like Nexenta, or OpenFiler.