Simplify your cloud journey with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Cloud technologies can help organizations remain competitive in today’s evolving digital world. Cloud environments offer increased efficiency, performance, and cost savings for adopters. As a result, 70% of organizations embrace hybrid cloud strategies, using at least 1 public and 1 private cloud.¹

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

Consistency is a key factor in successful cloud journeys. Standardizing on a single operating foundation across your datacenter and cloud environments can greatly simplify your path. 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 in any environment, 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 make the most of your cloud investments. This cloud-ready operating system (OS) provides a consistent, tailored experience across your organization’s physical, virtual, hybrid cloud, and multicloud environments including your edge infrastructure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also contains key features for optimal cloud performance: 

• 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 cloud security, usability, and consistency.
• Network configuration defaults align your systems with software-defined networking best practices.
• Instance boot-up testing and optimization for cloud providers reduces waiting time for instances to come online and reduces costs.

Red Hat has worked closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google, the largest cloud computing providers, to create cloud-optimized Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings. These offerings bring together a leading Linux OS with built-in, cloud provider-specific configurations that ensure performance, integration, and observability for your cloud workloads. This allows you to focus on initiatives that move your business forward, rather than spending time on operational functions.

Cloud-optimized benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Save time with a pretuned, ready-to-run image. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux image is preconfigured for performance with cloud provider-specific profiles.
• Simplify monitoring with enhanced observability and reporting. View Red Hat Enterprise Linux assets the same way you view the rest of your cloud assets.
• Speed operations with built-in management tools. Reconfigured with each cloud provider's specific tools, providing “ready-to-run” management on your cloud of choice.
• Increased security from boot to runtime. Secure boot and image attestation make certain customer workloads run on the latest top-down security technologies from image boot through runtime.
• Minimize infrastructure deviation. Image mode simplifies the building, deployment, and management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with container tools and technologies. It allows for automated updates and rollbacks—similar to your cell phone.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux optimized cloud offerings provide superior integration, security, and manageability, and lay the foundation for standardization. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a consistent platform across cloud and on-premise deployments, between development and production environments, and for a wide range of workloads. Whether you are migrating existing subscriptions to a cloud or deploying a new instance directly from a cloud marketplace, Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes getting started on your cloud of choice convenient.

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

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

Your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription includes access to Red Hat Lightspeed, which provides AI-powered management and advanced security capabilities. Gain visibility into business, operations, and security risks to proactively identify and mitigate issues across your infrastructure. And Red Hat Lightspeed 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 Lightspeed 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 foundation across all environments helps you create the consistency needed to maintain a security-focused and compliant cloud environment. 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 Lightspeed 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 1,400 certified cloud providers. 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 more user-friendly 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 are 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 a cloud environment.
• Purchase from your cloud provider: Obtain Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances from your chosen cloud provider on a predetermined time basis, such as hourly, monthly, or annually. 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. Use funds and discounts from Red Hat’s Hybrid Committed Spend program toward subscriptions and cloud instances.

Red Hat offers several simple options for deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in your desired cloud environments. 

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. Codeveloped 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, log in, or register at console.redhat.com and provide some basic information about your cloud account. You can also import custom images into your account built with the image builder tool or your own tools. 

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. 

With each of these options, you can link your Red Hat and cloud provider accounts to simplify management via Red Hat Lightspeed and access additional Red Hat resources. 

Cloud adoption is becoming the new normal. No matter where your organization is in its cloud journey, Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help your teams move forward more efficiently and effectively. 

Learn more about using your Red Hat subscriptions in any cloud environment.