Simplify your cloud journey with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Cloud technologies help organizations remain competitive. Cloud environments offer increased efficiency, performance, and cost savings for adopters. As a result, 63% of organizations now run more than 25% of their workloads in public cloud environments.¹ 

Even so, moving to the cloud creates complexity. Cloud environments add another infrastructure element that must be managed according to corporate and regulatory requirements. And, if you take a multicloud approach like 89% of organizations, your operations can become even more complicated.¹ Finally, it takes time to decide how to balance your workloads between on-site and cloud environments.

Consistency is a key factor in successful cloud journeys. Standardizing on a single operating system foundation across your datacenter and cloud environments can greatly simplify your path to the cloud. Rather than splitting operations and management into multiple domains, your teams can use a single set of tools and platforms to deploy, run, and move applications and workloads across multiple footprints.

Optimized for your applications no matter where they run, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® provides a consistent, manageable, and high-performance operating foundation for hybrid and multicloud environments. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux brings together your datacenter and cloud infrastructure to streamline operations, increase flexibility, and help you make the most of your cloud investments. This cloud-ready operating system provides a consistent, tailored experience across footprints, including physical, virtualized, hybrid cloud, multicloud, and even edge computing infrastructure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also contains key features for running in the cloud:

• Modular kernel package installation streamlines cloud instance boot, management, storage, and cost.
• Minimized package sets for prebuilt cloud images reduce your cybersecurity threat attack surface.
• Best practice-based defaults in cloud-init configure your systems for increased security, usability, and consistency across footprints.
• Network configuration defaults align your systems with software-defined networking best practices.
• Instance boot time testing and optimization for cloud providers reduces waiting time for instances to come online and saves cloud costs.

These optimizations were created in close collaboration with cloud partners to ensure that Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers excellent performance in cloud environments. Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for both on-site datacenter and cloud environments can help you improve productivity, security, and operations as you move to the cloud and adapt to a more digital world.

With a consistent experience across footprints, Red Hat Enterprise Linux lets your teams continue to use their current skills, existing processes, and familiar tools in the cloud. As a result, you can get up and running faster with less risk and less cost.

Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise LInux also streamlines your operations and management. You can use the same set of management tools — like Red Hat Insights, Red Hat Smart Management, and Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform — to administer and automate all of your environments, saving time and effort.

Your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription includes Red Hat Insights, a managed service that continuously analyzes platforms and applications to help you better manage and optimize your hybrid cloud environment. Red Hat Insights uses predictive analytics and deep domain expertise to speed complex operational tasks — including identifying security and performance risks, tracking licenses, and managing costs — from hours to minutes. With a focus on operations, security, and business outcomes, it proactively alerts administrators and stakeholders before an outage, security event, or overspending occurs. And Red Hat Insights works across on-site and cloud environments, allowing you to manage and optimize everything from a single interface.

Finally, to further simplify operations, you can link your Red Hat account to your cloud provider account and choose to automatically connect your cloud-based systems and workloads to Red Hat Insights and other Red Hat services when you provision them.

Consistency is at the core of security and compliance best practices. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux as your operating system across all environments helps you create the consistency needed to maintain security and compliance in the cloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes built-in security features, complies with strict industry and government standards, and supports a modular package structure to reduce your attack surface area in the cloud. The Red Hat Insights Compliance service helps you track your organization’s adherence to compliance requirements across your environments and provides remediation guidance to help you maintain compliance over time.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you flexibility and choice in the cloud. You can choose to run your workloads on more than 140 certified cloud providers with the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program (CCSP). A consistent operating foundation lets you move your workloads between different cloud providers and even back to on-site infrastructure as needed to optimize costs, take advantage of new features, and adhere to changing policies and regulations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also makes it easier to deploy your workloads in the cloud of your choice. The included image builder tool lets you create customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux images, save them as templates, and push them to multiple cloud provider inventories. And you can take advantage of certified golden images, included with your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, to speed deployment. As a result, you can be sure that the images you deploy on-site and across clouds are configured consistently.

Regardless of how you purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you’re backed by Red Hat’s award-winning support organization either directly or indirectly through your cloud provider’s support team. Red Hat works with cloud partners to provide expertise, knowledge, and, in some cases, joint support models to ensure you can successfully accomplish your goals with Red Hat solutions. You receive the same high-value experience whether you obtain Red Hat Enterprise Linux directly from Red Hat or through your cloud provider.

Red Hat subscriptions are designed for hybrid and multicloud environments — you can deploy your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription wherever it makes the most sense. Red Hat provides multiple purchasing options to align with your organization’s budget and requirements.

• Purchase from Red Hat: Purchase subscriptions directly from Red Hat and use them on-site or in the cloud.
• Purchase from your cloud provider: Obtain Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances from your chosen cloud provider on a predetermined time basis — hourly, monthly, or annually, for example. You can also buy instances on demand and pay only for what you use.
• Apply Red Hat or cloud provider committed spend funds: Apply your cloud provider committed spend funds and discounts to Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances. Or use funds and discounts from Red Hat’s Hybrid Committed Spend program for subscriptions and cloud instances.

Red Hat offers several simple options for deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in your choice of clouds. 

Option 1: Prepaid subscriptions

You can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions purchased from Red Hat with your choice of certified cloud and service providers. Simply select a cloud provider and decide whether you want to use Red Hat gold images or your own images in the cloud. Co-developed Red Hat gold images for all major cloud providers — like Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud — are included with your subscription. To add a gold image to your cloud account,simply log in or register at console.redhat.com and provide some basic information about your cloud account. You can also import custom images built with the image builder tool, or your own tools, into your cloud account.

Option 2: On-demand instances

Ready-to-use Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances are offered through many cloud provider marketplaces, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. These images are purchased through the cloud provider and billed on-demand according to use.

Option 3: Hybrid cloud committed spend

You can use your AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud committed spend contracts and discounts for Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances on those clouds. 

And, with all of these options, you can link your Red Hat and cloud provider accounts to simplify management via Red Hat Insights and easily access Red Hat resources.

Cloud adoption is now the norm. No matter where you are in your cloud journey, Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help you move forward more efficiently and effectively.

Learn more about using your Red Hat subscriptions in the cloud.

Learn more about the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise LInux in the cloud.