Dr. Dobb's | Red Hat Announces On-Demand Amazon Compute Cloud

Red Hat Announces On-Demand Amazon Compute Cloud

Amazon EC2 is a Web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud

November 07, 2007
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/red-hat-announces-on-demand-amazon-compu/202803457

Red Hat has announced beta availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a Web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat Network management service, technical support, and certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's network infrastructure and datacenters.

According to Red hat, the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by letting customers pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 lets customers increase or decrease capacity within minutes, removing the need to over-buy software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand.

As part of its deployment solution bridging both on-premise and cloud computing, Red Hat Network offers a common set of management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Red Hat will provide technical support and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.

"In collaboration with Amazon Web Services, we are now able to offer customers yet another choice in how they deploy the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. This offering will be appealing to developers, customers looking to quickly and cost-effectively deploy web-scale services and businesses that require rapidly scaled compute resources," said Donald Fischer, vice president of Online Services at Red Hat. "The marriage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Amazon's EC2 service makes the promise of professional web scale computing a reality."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 is available as a private beta today, with public beta availability planned for the fourth calendar quarter of 2007. Base prices are $19 per month, per user and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 for every compute hour used on Amazon's EC2 service, depending on whether customers choose a small, large or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and storage fees.