Using the no-cost Developer Subscription with the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Image Builder hosted service

We recently published "Introducing the hosted beta experience Red Hat Enterprise Linux Image Builder," hosted service as part of the Insights application suite.  As a followup to that exciting announcement, we are pleased to share that this new service can be used with the no-cost Developer Subscription for Individuals, providing the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Insights, and simple OS image creation to everyone!  

More information about this subscription offering is on Red Hat Developer site, "No-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux Individual Developer Subscription: FAQs."

Access to Image Builder requires a Red Hat account and at least one subscription of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  If you do not have either of these, you can easily request them at no cost.

If you do not have a Red Hat Customer Portal account,  follow the instructions in How to activate your no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. You will need to follow the instructions to “download” RHEL in order to associate the developer subscription to your account, as well as accept the agreement questions.  However, you can cancel the actual file download. 

You have a Red Hat Customer Portal account and can log in, but do not have any RHEL subscriptions associated with your account.

Follow the instructions, beginning at Step 2, in How to activate your no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. You will need to follow the instructions to “download” RHEL in order to associate the developer subscription to your account, as well as accept the agreement questions.  However, you can cancel the actual file download.

Next you can verify your subscription as well as create your own activation key to make it easier to register and see the benefits of Insights functionality after you launch instances from the images you have created:

After logging in to the Red Hat Customer Portal, click on the Subscriptions tab at the top left of the screen.  This will take you to the Overview page where you can click the toggle button to enable Simple Content Access which makes it easier to register and access content for RHEL updates in the images that you create.

Next, you can click on the Subscriptions sub-tab within the Overview page.  This will list the active subscriptions associated with your account.  You should see either existing RHEL subscriptions listed or the Red hat Developer Subscription for Individuals if you followed the previous instructions to add it to your personal account.

Next, you can click on the Manage tab drop-down menu and select Activation Keys.  On this screen you can click on New to create and name your own activation key, as well as associate the desired subscriptions you wish to be associated with the activation key. Using an activation key allows you to choose which of your subscriptions are used for different use cases or users, as well as avoids the need to use username and password credentials to your account for your build workflow.

Now you are ready to log into the beta version of the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console using your Red Hat account - or register for an account - and click on Image Builder in the left navigation. The process is designed to be intuitive, and documentation is provided throughout. We hope you enjoy using our new RHEL Image Builder service!