Red Hat is now making its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform available 'in the cloud' over Amazon's EC2.

The JBoss move follows Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)which became available on EC2 in November of 2007.

"The availability of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Amazon EC2 helps lower technology entry barriers to open source middleware while giving developers familiar solutions to use within the cloud," said Aaron Darcy, director, product marketing at Red Hat in statement.

In my view this is a case of catch-up. First Red Hat had to make sure RHEL worked as it should in the cloud. Making JBoss available is the next logical step. I have not seen any real tangible revenue numbers or financial indications about the RHEL EC2 effort to date - but it will be interesting to see how it will grow now that there is an app server to go with it.