Nobody can miss the dramatic proliferation of cloud computing platforms and initiatives over the last couple of years. All through the last year, Sun has remained oddly silent on the whole thing. There is a clear, natural synergy between Linux, commodity x86 hardware, and cloud computing. Sun is conspicuously absent from all of those markets.  Sun clearly needs to regain relevance in this space.

On the one hand, Project Caroline now has its own website. Anybody can create an account that allows forum reading, but don't count on getting your hands on hardware unless you've got an idea that Sun approves of.

Apart from that, Om Malik reports that we may see a joint announcement Monday morning from Sun and Amazon.

I suspect that the announcement will look something like this:

• Based on AWS for accounts, billing, storage, and infrastructure
• Java-based application deployment into a Sun grid container
• AWS to handle load balancing, networking, etc.

In other words: it will look a lot like Project Caroline and the Google App Engine, running Java applications using Sun containers on top of AWS.