Novell has shaken up the delivery model for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) offering by making it available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud on an hourly pricing basis. The Linux distribution operating system will now be available as versions 10 and 11 on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with customers paying only for the hours they use.

Novell has overseen the development of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server since 2003, when the company acquired the SUSE brand. This new proposition from Novell will include all instance sizes and will be open to every AWS region around the world.

According to Novell, the company will also provide a maintenance service on AWS so that customers can keep their SLES instances up-to-date with the most current security patches, bug fixes and new features.

"Novell enables Amazon EC2 users to purchase maintenance subscriptions for enterprise Linux instances directly on Amazon EC2 without first signing a separate license agreement. Through the SUSE Cloud Program, service providers can also enhance SUSE Linux Enterprise Server instances by either reselling Novell's technical support or delivering their own support services backed by Novell's expertise," said Markus Rex, senior vice president and general manager of Open Platform Solutions at Novell.

As more companies take up the option of buying in so-called “utility priced computing infrastructures,” it will be interesting to see how successful commercially maintained and supported Linux distributions of this kind are in terms of market adoption.

Novell is aiming to capitalize on those companies who feel they can achieve efficiencies through on-demand models that enable intelligent workload management. But the company is still keen to point out that its SUSE Cloud Program means that customers can have a common Linux platform across the physical and virtual environments behind their firewall — and then a pay-for-use version of that Linux in the cloud.