Why choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS?

Amazon Web Services® (AWS) is a cloud provider for organizations that want to respond to rapid change and scale reliably in the cloud. Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® is the stable operating system (OS) that enables you to meet the challenges of IT complexity and consistently deploy applications across different cloud environments. Whether you’re just getting started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or want to bring your existing Red Hat infrastructure to AWS, together they offer solutions to help you transform your IT environment and operations for a cloud-based future.

Open hybrid cloud is an approach to cloud computing that allows organizations to take advantage of their existing IT strategy while setting themselves up for future advances in technology. Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud strategy, supported by open source technologies, allows for consistent interaction with any app in nearly any environment without retraining staff, splitting management, or sacrificing security.

Cloud challenges 

Maybe you’ve already established your IT operations in the cloud, or maybe you're eyeing a migration from on premise systems. Either way, you need to manage the scale and complexity of your cloud landscape, and that comes with a number of challenges: 

• Establishing an IT infrastructure that will support both your application needs as well as your business goals. 
• Finding an operating environment that doesn’t change with new deployment footprints and helps to stop problems before they start. 
• Managing the complexity of deploying and scaling on different environments. 
• Finding tools that are available, secure and reliable wherever you want to use them. 

To face these challenges, you need an IT foundation that provides frictionless management and built-in automation alongside a secure path from development to production with the tools to move workloads across the open hybrid cloud. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the solution  

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the common foundation needed to reduce overall IT complexity and support the migration of applications to different cloud environments, supporting:

• Simple and streamlined management with tooling that includes best practices and expert guidance. 
• Consistent deployment across the hybrid cloud so that IT teams don’t have to build additional skills for different environments.
• Seamless integration into the development lifecycle so that any member of the development team can access what they need quickly—facilitating a simple path to production without vendor lock-in.

A Red Hat subscription offers production-ready code, life-cycle management, software interoperability, and the flexibility to choose from multiple supported versions. It also gives you access to a community of experts, thousands of partners, knowledge resources, security updates, and support tools that you can't get anywhere else.

Combining Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AWS brings together the best of both offerings. Organizations get an intelligent, stable, and security-focused OS for modern, agile business operations. They also gain globally available, on-demand, security-focused, resizable cloud computing capacity for their workloads and applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the foundation of Red Hat’s container strategy – providing application mobility, proven enterprise security, and support at an enterprise scale.

Containers are Linux technologies, and Red Hat offers its solutions on AWS to ensure enterprises have easy integrations, support, and a consistent experience regardless of the workloads or applications you are running. A Red Hat Enterprise Linux works with open source container tools Podman, Buildah, and Skopeo, allowing developers to easily spin up containers, manage deployment, and speed development of new applications in the cloud. Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) provides developers pre-built images to consume a number of language runtimes. In many instances, developers can just consume an image and start working on the application they are building. You can also let Red Hat build, maintain, and upload a Red Hat gold image Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that you can deploy directly from your AWS console to quickly and easily launch an image. 

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud® (Amazon EC2) is a function of AWS that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud, making it easier for developers to scale and change their computing requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2 leverages the cost effectiveness, scalability and flexibility of Amazon EC2, the proven reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and premium support from both AWS and Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux integrates with existing Amazon EC2 features including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon CloudWatch®, Elastic-Load Balancing, and Elastic IP addresses. 

AWS provides updates as soon as they are made available from Red Hat so that your computing environment remains reliable and secure and your apps stay supported. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux High-Availability Add-On is now available within the Amazon EC2 console.

Simplified management

Award-winning tools from Red Hat and AWS automate and configure application management for everything from provisioning, scaling, policy enforcement, and decommissioning. Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console saves time and simplifies daily administration of your systems with an easy-to-use user interface accessible even to new Linux users, and automated system roles make it easy to optimize security groups and workflows and maintain them over time with minimal resources. Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) to help users install, update, remove, and keep track of software packages and permissions from specific repositories in the Linux system.

Security features 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AWS verify consistency through a two process approach to continuous security. First, the operating system must pass a validation process to be listed on AWS Marketplace. Second, artificial intelligence tools – AWS Inspector and Red Hat Insights (included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux)–constantly monitor the enterprise environment.

Red Hat also provides linux kernel live patching to respond to vulnerabilities without disrupting your Linux instances and applies security updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as soon as they are available. Its modular package structure reduces your attack surface and protects your systems in the cloud. These updates are designed to ensure reliability, protect user data, and fix security vulnerabilities as they are discovered. 

Payment options

Red Hat works closely with AWS to provide convenient purchasing and pricing options. Organizations can use their committed spend with AWS toward the purchase of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This allows them to take advantage of the discounts outlined in their committed spend agreement with AWS (known as Enterprise Discount Program) when making the purchase on the AWS Marketplace. Alternatively, you can work directly with Red Hat to develop a custom payment agreement tailored to your needs,  or choose the pay-as-you-go option.

Flexibility 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed to have consistent performance and security across different footprints, whether in the cloud, on-premise, or at the edge. Today’s modern IT environments are hybrid, with workloads deployed in whatever location necessary for performance, scale, and compliance. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is engineered to perform optimally on AWS, but it is also part of a much larger partner ecosystem. For instance, SAP® environments are certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, one of only two Linux distributions that bears that certification. This extensive ecosystem also provides freedom from vendor lock-in.

Portability

Red Hat solutions on AWS are optimized for performance. Meanwhile, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been designed to provide AWS users with the same level of security, scalability, manageability, and reliability Red Hat users have come to expect from their more traditional on-premise deployments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premise customers can easily transfer their subscription to a cloud provider of their choice with Cloud Access. This option provides true portability and offers streamlined services like customizable images and simplified subscription management. Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows you to place workloads and data where it makes the most sense at all times. To ease deployment across clouds, the included image builder tool lets you create customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux images, save them as templates, and push them to cloud inventories. 

Integration 

Red Hat brings more than 25 years of Linux expertise and a broad portfolio of tools, solutions, and partners that integrate and work seamlessly with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux tightly integrates with Red Hat OpenShift, An enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform with full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, and edge deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also certified on AWS, giving users consistency across their infrastructure. Whether using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS or on-premise, enterprises can manage all of their applications and workloads with a single tool. 

We’ve made it easy for you to securely use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS. You have flexibility when it comes to the type of images you use and how you pay for them. Select a Red Hat product to learn how to use it on AWS—in a way that fits your needs.

Already have Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Keep all the benefits of your Red Hat subscription—including our award-winning support—while operating on AWS with Red Hat Cloud Access. 

Already use AWS? Use your AWS committed spend toward the purchase of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to take advantage of the Enterprise Discount Program when making the purchase on the AWS Marketplace. 

New to both? Check out all your options to get started in the cloud with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AWS.