Why choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure?

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A consistent OS across datacenter and cloud environments can help overcome complexity and simplify your cloud journey. Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® provides a consistent operating foundation for hybrid and multicloud environments, so you can run applications where it makes the most sense–and choose the best cloud provider for your needs. Microsoft Azure is a public cloud platform with the ability to build, manage, and run applications in the cloud, and provide services on-premise and at the edge. When you run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure, you are extending your data center into a connected cloud environment.

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Organizations choose to enter a hybrid cloud for a variety of reasons: they’re looking to scale better, improve performance, or take advantage of the resource and cost saving measures that come with using public cloud space for their applications. An open source approach to the hybrid cloud empowers enterprises to move to the cloud with confidence, giving them the flexibility to be where their partners are and the consistency they need to make the cloud migration process as seamless as possible.

Cloud computing was built from open source–and open source is at the core of Red Hat and its vision for the open hybrid cloud. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, your operations, development, and security teams can build and manage a full IT stack in a standard, unifying platform that works on bare metal, virtual machines, private clouds, public clouds, and at the edge.

Cloud challenges

Adding one or more cloud environments to your IT landscape brings a new level of complexity. For example, you might be learning how to manage on-premises infrastructure for storing sensitive data while adopting public cloud for application development. 

Here are some common challenges organizations may face as they navigate their hybrid environments: 

  • Inconsistent deployment footprints: New environments add migration obstacles and increase overall deployment complexity.
  • Friction in the development cycle: Developers need quick and easy access to reliable operating system (OS) images as well as the toolchains, libraries, container tools and runtimes they’re familiar with in order to begin working quickly. This can prove to be difficult if an organization is managing multiple provider platforms that don’t use the required tools developers need to work–and it can potentially slow down cloud deployments.
  • Difficulty managing subscriptions: Moving to the cloud may add complexity in procuring, tracking, accounting and overall infrastructure management.

A Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription

Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to deliver the enterprise dependability and features you know while adding optimizations that help you make the most of your cloud investments. It’s the flexible OS for your open hybrid cloud, offering control, confidence, and freedom to support business innovation, no matter where it occurs.

With a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, you have access to:

  • Simple and streamlined management with tooling that includes best practices and expert guidance. 
  • Consistent deployment across the hybrid cloud so that IT teams don’t have to build additional skills for different environments.
  • Seamless integration into the development lifecycle so that any member of the development team can access what they need quickly—facilitating a simple path to production.

A Red Hat subscription offers all the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with production-ready code, life-cycle management, software interoperability, and the flexibility to choose from multiple supported versions. It also gives you access to a community of experts, thousands of partners, knowledge resources, security updates, and support tools that you can't get anywhere else.

Red Hat and Microsoft work in close collaboration to help ensure solutions are optimized for cloud performance. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure, you can quickly deploy a more secure, reliable, flexible hybrid cloud environment with interoperable cloud-native development capabilities–positioning your organization for success in fast-changing, competitive markets.

  • Quickly launch and scale applications and improve reliability, security, and performance with tested and certified interoperability across on-premise and cloud environments.
  • Protect your data, applications, and business and infrastructure with advanced, integrated security features that work across your hybrid environment. 
  • Seamlessly integrate traditional on-premise applications and cloud-native workloads with a consistent foundation.
  • Run cloud-native applications on-premise to meet latency and connectivity requirements for edge and disconnected solutions.

Overall, Red Hat and Microsoft deliver an integrated solution that sets you up for innovation and transformation, no matter where you are in your hybrid cloud journey. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure: A business accelerator for digital transformation

Ensuring security, controlling costs, effectively managing resources, and guaranteeing resource availability are important considerations when building a hybrid environment. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Azure provide a unique and powerful mix of flexibility and consistency, allowing organizations to embrace hybrid cloud and innovation with the same level of award-winning security, scalability, manageability, and reliability that Red Hat users have come to expect on-premise.

Simplified migration and management

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure simplifies workload migration, helping you get to the cloud more rapidly without having to change your OS–and with less risk and less cost. IT and development teams can continue to use their current skills, processes, and tools to administer and automate your environments across clouds and on premise, without extensive delays from retraining or other modifications. 

Red Hat Insights (included in your Red Hat subscription) is a comprehensive management experience that uses predictive analytics and deep domain expertise to streamline operational tasks like identifying and addressing security and performance risks, tracking licenses, and managing costs. The browser-based tool works across on-site and cloud environments, so you can manage everything from a single interface with no additional infrastructure to install or maintain. The included Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console helps simplify daily administration of your systems, with a web-based interface to Linux servers located in your network environment.

With automated system roles, Red Hat Enterprise Linux also makes it easy to optimize security groups and workflows and maintain them over time with minimal resources. 

Flexibility

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the flexible and consistent OS for your hybrid cloud, across any platform. It is certified for use with hundreds of cloud providers, so you can choose the best IT infrastructure options for your business. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Azure provide jointly engineered capabilities optimized for cloud use, giving enterprises the choice and flexibility they need to reach their goals and help ensure reliable, security-focused performance in the cloud. 

The large ecosystem of certified solutions allows you to customize hybrid cloud environments, including software and services from providers like SAP and Microsoft

You can also choose to provision your own Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines (VMs) or download pre-provisioned images from Azure Marketplace. Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes an image builder tool that lets you create customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux images based on your workload needs, save them as templates, and push them to cloud inventories. You also have the option to use ready-to-deploy Red Hat certified gold images. To further customize your environment, you can take advantage of Microsoft Azure Hybrid Benefit to enable switching between pay as you go (on demand) and a Red Hat subscription. 

Built-in security and compliance

Red Hat and Microsoft use their extensive experience to build advanced security features into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Azure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure helps secure and streamline the path from deployment to production with the tools to move workloads across the open hybrid cloud. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux works with open source container tools Podman, Buildah, and Skopeo, allowing developers to easily spin up containers, manage deployment, and speed development of new applications in the cloud. It also includes application streams, and security controls, upgrades, and patches–all backed by a 10-year support lifecycle. Its modular package structure reduces your attack surface and protects your systems in the cloud with built-in security features and compliance with industry and government regulations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure provides best practice-based default settings that configure your system for increased security. Red Hat Insights lets you scan your systems for common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs), as well as issues identified by your cloud provider, collect scan information, and access remediation guidance using a single interface. Azure users with a Red Hat subscription also receive ongoing support from the Red Hat Product Security team. 

Payment options

Red Hat and Microsoft Azure offer multiple purchasing options, giving you the flexibility to choose the one that best fits your organization’s procurement processes. You can bring your existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription (purchased directly from Red Hat), pay as you go (on demand), or purchase directly from Azure marketplace. With any of these options, you can take advantage of your committed spend agreement with Azure (known as the Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment). Alternatively, you can choose the Red Hat Hybrid Committed Spend program which spans across cloud providers and on premise deployments.

Portability

Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you a foundation for portability, allowing you to place workloads and data where it makes the most sense at all times. Existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premise customers can easily transfer their subscription to Azure with the Red Hat Cloud Access program. This option also offers streamlined services like customizable images and simplified subscription management. If you make the decision to migrate workloads back to your datacenter, Red Hat Enterprise Linux lets you easily and rapidly move workloads to the cloud and back to your own datacenter if needed–without the need for platform changes.

Integrated support

Red Hat and Microsoft also share an integrated, co-located support team, providing a unified contact point for Red Hat ecosystems running on the Azure platform. The complete support experience features multilingual engineers across 18 regions, colocated staff from both companies, an integrated ticketing system, and a coordinated escalation and resolution process. This gives you access to expertise, knowledge, and joint support models via Red Hat’s award-winning support organization or in coordination with the Azure support team.

We’ve made it easy for you to securely use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure. You have flexibility when it comes to the type of images you use and how you pay for them. Select a Red Hat product to learn how to use it on Azure—in a way that fits your needs.

Already have Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Keep all the benefits of your Red Hat subscription—including our award-winning support—while operating on Azure with Red Hat Cloud Access. 

Already use Azure? You can use your committed spend toward the purchase of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Azure marketplace. 

New to both? Check out all your options to get started in the cloud with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Azure. 

 

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