Amazon will offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux on demand in EC2

LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has inked a deal with Amazon to make its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.

Red Hat will allow Amazon Web Service (AWS) customers to acquire RHEL on demand for use in the firm's EC2 service. At present EC2 customers can bring their existing RHEL licenses over to EC2 instances, however the new deal will allow users to buy licenses directly through Amazon.

Terry Wise, Amazon's director of business development for AWS said that customers have been asking for on-demand RHEL support, adding, "Our customers have been vocal about their need to provision supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the same way that they provision AWS EC2 and only pay for what they use. This announcement is the result of an extensive collaboration between Red Hat and AWS to satisfy real customer needs."

Scott Crenshaw, VP and general manager of cloud business at Red Hat said that the announcement was about giving customers more choice and pushing RHEL further into the cloud. Crenshaw said, "Giving developers broad access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux using Amazon EC2 is an important step in our evolution in the cloud."

Red Hat has been pushing the cloud capabilities of its RHEL distribution aggressively and the ability for Amazon EC2 users to buy and deploy RHEL should ensure that the Linux firm makes more sales in this fast growing area of the market.

Amazon said it will be rolling out its RHEL on-demand service in the coming weeks. µ