Optimizing cloud spend with Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

Rising virtualization costs, licensing constraints, and operational complexity are driving teams to evaluate more flexible and cost-effective paths to the cloud. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, combined with Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), supports hardware overcommit in the cloud, allowing customers to run more virtual machines (VMs) on fewer cloud resources. By aligning resource consumption more closely to actual usage patterns, organizations can significantly reduce compute costs. This provides a practical way to consolidate VM footprints and maximize the value of cloud investments.

Customers can also take advantage of AWS buying programs to further improve cost efficiency. ROSA supports pay-as-you-go pricing, the use of existing AWS cloud committed spend agreements, reserved instances, savings plans and, of course, unified billing. These options offer multiple paths to align OpenShift consumption with financial planning strategies and help organizations convert Red Hat software and managed site reliability engineering (SRE) services into predictable, planned expenditures.

Increased efficiency

Operational efficiency is another key benefit. ROSA is jointly supported by Red Hat and AWS, and Red Hat SRE teams manage the day-to-day operations of the service. This includes upgrades, monitoring, scaling, and incident response. Offloading these activities can help reduce infrastructure management efforts and free teams to focus on delivering applications, accelerating time to value.

For organizations adopting AI and GPU-accelerated workloads, ROSA offers additional scalability and cost advantages when compared to on-premise environments. Teams can provision GPU instances on demand for planned projects and pay only for what they consume. This helps reduce large upfront capital expenditures while ensuring GPU resources are allocated efficiently and used at high utilization rates.

Together, these capabilities help organizations make better use of their cloud resources by modernizing onto a single application platform. OpenShift provides a consistent environment for running traditional VMs, cloud-native applications and AI/ML workloads, reducing infrastructure sprawl and lowering per-workload costs as environments grow. 

Watch the video below to learn more about optimizing costs with ROSA.