Red Hat extends subscription option to private, public clouds

Red Hat has come up with a compelling way to get enterprises to buy premier and advanced premier subscriptions.

On Tuesday, the Raleigh, NC Linux leader launched a new feature called Red Hat Cloud Access that permits subscriptions customers to move their Linux subscriptions between on-premise servers and Red Hat Certified Clouds on public cloud infrastructures.

The cloud access feature is enabled for Amazon Web Services via the Amazon EC2 platform.

Red Hat Cloud Access is available to premier and advanced premier enterprise subscription customers at no extra cost, said Mike Ferris, director, Product Strategy for Red Hat's cloud solutions.

"It's a clean licensing and business model and a way to maintain a consistent support level," Ferris said, noting that Amazon and Red Hat will collaborate to guarantee customer service level agreements are honored. "We offered our [Linux subscription] on an hourly basis and with limited support on Amazon but what we've learned is that customers want to leverage everything they have on premise on the public cloud, including support."

The arrangement gives customers significant flexibility over how they want to deploy workloads without the need for new business or support models, Red Hat announced.

For example, workloads can be run on physical servers, virtual on-premise servers or in Amazon Web Services.

The subscription feature is available today for Amazon EC2 and others will likely follow.