Amazon and Oracle have announced that the popular enterprise database will now be available in pre-packed instances for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

A variety of versions are available, running on Oracle Enterprise Linux and fully supported by Oracle support as well as Amazon. Oracle's licensing has been updated so that users with existing licensing can apply it to cloud-based software instances with no additional fees.

This is a significant step for cloud-based services, and for Oracle, which has been criticized as floundering in its attempts to bring its popular database system into an easily consumable online form. And Amazon, which has had recurring issues with its Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud offering, has been able to provide more reliable service with EC2 but not, so far, any major, popular enterprise packages with full support from the original vendor. By partnering on this venture, both businesses are gaining some expertise and experience in areas where they were separately quite weak; and leery CIOs can have more confidence that moving mainstream operations to the cloud can now not only cut costs, but also be supported by the vendor in a pinch.