Optimize cloud performance with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for AWS

Across industries, organizations are moving to the cloud to achieve digital business goals. In fact, enterprise organizations run 52% of their workloads and store 51% of their data in a public cloud today.¹ 

Your choice of operating system (OS) and cloud provider are strategic decisions. Your OS forms the foundation for your entire environment—security, management, portability, and lifecycle planning start with the OS. And your ability to scale flexibly, maintain availability, and deliver resilient services is greatly influenced by your cloud provider.

Standardizing on a single operating foundation across your datacenter and cloud environments can simplify your path to the cloud, streamline your operations, and optimize your cloud performance. Rather than splitting operations and management into multiple domains, your teams can use a single set of tools and platforms to deploy, run, safeguard, and move applications and workloads across multiple footprints.

Even so, not all combinations of operating systems and cloud providers offer the features, capabilities, and resources needed to operate effectively and efficiently in hybrid cloud environments. Consistency, security, manageability, interoperability, and support across your entire environment are critical for making the most of your cloud investments.

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® for Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers more value for your organization, providing a flexible, stable, and reliable foundation for innovation. The cloud-ready, security-focused OS provides a consistent, tailored experience across footprints, while modern cloud infrastructure gives you always-on capacity, integrated security, and flexible services.

Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for both on-site datacenter and AWS environments can help you improve productivity, security, and operations as you continue moving workloads and data to the cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for AWS is built to achieve optimum performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for AWS-based workloads. Deeply integrated into the AWS fabric with AWS-specific configurations and profiles, it boosts performance, security, and manageability, and creates a foundation for standardization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for AWS gives you access to:

• Global, security-focused cloud infrastructure and services.
• Flexible consumption models and purchasing options.
• Award-winning support and expertise.
• Proactive analytics and management tools and services.
• Security certifications, tools, and resources.
• Developer-friendly tools and programs.
• Optimized offerings for Microsoft SQL Server and SAP deployments.

Choose how you want to purchase, consume, and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat solutions are designed for hybrid cloud environments—you can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux wherever it makes the most sense. Red Hat and AWS offer multiple purchasing options to fit your organization’s procurement processes:

• Obtain Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances from AWS Marketplace.
• Use your AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) funds and discounts for Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances on AWS.
• Use the Red Hat Hybrid Committed Spend program for discounted pricing and flexible payment options on site and on AWS.
• Purchase subscriptions from Red Hat to use on-premise or on AWS via Red Hat Cloud Access.

Access award-winning support and expertise

Regardless of how you purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you are backed by Red Hat’s award-winning support in coordination with AWS support teams. Red Hat works with AWS to provide expertise, knowledge, and joint support models to position you to achieve your business goals using Red Hat solutions. You receive the same high-value experience whether you obtain Red Hat Enterprise Linux directly from Red Hat or through AWS.

You can choose from several levels of support to meet the needs of different teams—and your budget. For example, you may choose self-support for development systems and premium 24x7 support for production systems.

Red Hat support teams work closely with Red Hat engineering and product teams, along with AWS, to solve issues quickly. Specialty-based routing makes sure support calls and tickets go directly to the right experts. Red Hat also takes learnings from support cases and compiles them into helpful documentation on the Red Hat Customer Portal, where you can access reference architectures, best practices, product documentation, videos, collaborative discussion, labs, and tools.

Streamline operations and management across clouds

Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AWS lets you use the same set of built-in management tools to administer your datacenter and cloud environments, saving time and effort.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for AWS is integrated with the preconfigured AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), which allows you to interact with AWS services directly from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux host, simplifying operations. A list of preset AWS commands come readily available, helping you minimize additional setup.

Another key management tool is Red Hat Insights, an end-to-end system management solution integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux that uses predictive analytics and deep domain expertise to streamline operational tasks. It provides active alerts of impending outages, security events, and overspending, and works across on-premise and cloud environments, so you can manage everything from a single interface. To further simplify operations, you can link your Red Hat account to your AWS account and choose to automatically connect your cloud-based systems and workloads to Red Hat Insights and other Red Hat services upon provisioning.

Red Hat Insights offers key capabilities for your connected AWS environment:

• Subscriptions service. Track and optimize your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription use across your entire environment.
• Resource optimization service. Scale your AWS deployments using central processing unit (CPU), memory, and input/output (I/O) performance metrics that tell you whether your systems are optimized, undersized, oversized, under pressure, or idling.
• Image builder service. Create, manage, and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux images consistently and rapidly across your datacenter and AWS environments. You can take advantage of certified gold images, included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to speed deployment.
• Vulnerability service. Scan your systems for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and access prioritized remediation guidance that is tested with AWS.
• Compliance and policies services. Set policies and track adherence to compliance requirements across systems regardless of where they run.
• Malware service. Detect malware in your systems regardless of where they are deployed.
• Drift service. Identify configuration drift that can lead to performance, availability, security, and compliance issues.
• Patch service. Manage patching across all Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems in your environment.

The inclusion of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed further streamlines management. This gen AI tool helps teams with varying levels of Linux experience efficiently deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux for AWS by allowing them to use plain language to ask and receive answers to Linux-related questions, as well as access actionable guidance.

Maintain security and compliance in the cloud

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS delivers integrated, automated security capabilities throughout your infrastructure and software stack. Built-in OS security features such as live kernel patching, security profiles, security standards certification, and a trusted software supply chain help you meet today’s high security and compliance expectations. A modular package structure and immutable system images reduce your attack surface and protect your systems in the cloud. Best practice-based default settings configure your systems for stronger security posture in the cloud from the start. And an included identity management tool lets you adopt zero trust architectures more easily.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for AWS offers further security features to safeguard AWS workloads, including Secure Boot, confidential compute, and confidential hypervisor. Through image attestation and top-down memory encryption, these features deepen protections for the OS boot process and runtime.

Red Hat and AWS validate all Red Hat Enterprise Linux security profiles to make sure they run as expected on AWS infrastructure. AWS also includes advanced security features and a large number of compliance certifications and accreditations. AWS policies, architecture, and operational processes are built to the stringent requirements of security-sensitive organizations.

The Red Hat Product Security team monitors, identifies, and addresses risks quickly and provides tools and data to help measure security. Red Hat and AWS also provide security advisories for current issues and can work with you to resolve security problems when needed. Automated tools, regular updates and patch releases, and accessible expertise safeguard your environment. 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.

Support your developers no matter where they work

Adopting a common platform such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux for development, test, and production environments streamlines time to launch for new applications and reduces the risk of incompatibilities and issues at launch. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers access to reliable OS images on AWS in addition to the toolchains, libraries, container tools, and runtimes needed to streamline the path from development to production. Updates are delivered via application streams, allowing developers and IT architects to experiment with the latest tools, runtime languages, and databases while still maintaining earlier versions of production applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.6 and 10 include image mode, which helps developers streamline cloud-native application development and IT operations into a single pipeline by allowing Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be deployed as a bootc container image. Image mode keeps server configurations the same, which eliminates deviations so that developers can make sure that OS deployments are consistent. The ability to manage the OS using the same container tools and workflows as applications helps developers accelerate delivery.

Red Hat also offers developer-specific resources, programs, and subscriptions to help organizations develop on Red Hat Enterprise Linux more efficiently and cost-effectively:

• Red Hat Developer program
• Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals
• Red Hat Developer Subscription for Teams

These programs can be used both in your datacenter and in your AWS environment.

Standardizing on a flexible, stable, and reliable operating system across hybrid cloud environments can simplify your journey to the cloud and optimize your cloud performance. Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS gives you a consistent, manageable, and security-focused foundation for maximizing value from your AWS investments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for AWS is available through AWS Marketplace or with Red Hat Cloud Access for existing subscriptions. Learn more at redhat.com/aws.