Red Hat sends RHEL on web into beta

RED HAT'S plan to make its stack available as a web
service has inched forward with availability of a beta
for users to kick around.

Earlier this month, Red Hat caused something of a
splash by announcing plans to put its Red Hat
Enterprise Linux distro on Amazon’s Elastic Compute
Cloud (EC2).

The cunning plot will mean that instead
of paying upfront for servers and software licences,
buyers will be able to flex pricing depending on usage
of processing power, bandwidth and storage.

If you’re Jif, maker of plastic lemons for pancakes, you pay a
high price in the build up to Shrove Tuesday, for
example. If you’re a seller of Christmas gifts, your
big bills come now but January will be cheap as chips.

Interested parties can register here but will have to
be prepared to swallow a $19 per month
support/software bill for the pleasure, and stump up
between 21 and 94 cents per hour for the service,
depending on size of server instance.

Bandwidth and storage will be additionally charged at a per-gigabyte rate and you pay for the service by credit card.

Have a go and let us know whether cloud computing is
‘blue skies, nothing but blue skies’, a case of ‘here
comes my rainy day’ or an in-between ‘every cloud has
a silver lining’ experience. µ