Simplify Procurement of OpenShift Directly with your Cloud Provider Billing Account

Red Hat has significantly invested in integration of OpenShift in cloud provider offerings.  Customers can consume OpenShift on their cloud provider of choice AND benefit from a fully managed solutionRed Hat OpenShift on Amazon Web Services (ROSA) and Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) are managed OpenShift offerings natively integrated into the control plane and billing engine of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. They have been built jointly with Red Hat based on strong customer demand to allow customers to focus on your business needs and leave the cluster lifecycle to trained experts.

Customers who prefer a self-managed OpenShift cluster can go directly to the cloud provider’s marketplace and get OpenShift for immediate on-demand usage. Customers who choose this option will have the flexibility to customize their deployments. The cloud provider handles the billing and usage will count towards the customer’s spend commitment with the cloud provider. 

This leverages your cloud provider’s billing account to pay for OpenShift subscriptions on-demand and per actual usage at the basis of a vCPU hour..

Procuring OpenShift via Cloud Marketplaces

Red Hat has worked extensively with AWS and Microsoft Azure to create offerings for all OpenShift variants.  We are working with Google Cloud as well and plan to have an OpenShift offering before the end of the year.  

While the workflow may vary among cloud providers in small details, the overall process of procuring OpenShift from those marketplaces looks like this:

1. Discover and decide for an OpenShift offering from the marketplace catalog
1. e.g OpenShift Container Platform on Microsoft Azure Marketplace
2. e.g OpenShift Container Platform on Amazon Web Services Marketplace
2. Select your payment model (pay-as-you-go per vCPU/hr vs. 1 or 3 year upfront payment)
3. Procure the offering from the marketplace and wait for virtual machine images to be provided into your cloud providers’ account
4. Use the OpenShift installer and instruct it to use the virtual machine images from the marketplace to install your cluster

One Stop Billing via your Cloud Provider 

This flow creates a cluster that is billed entirely through your cloud provider's billing setup, for both the cloud infrastructure and the OpenShift subscription. Customers only need to subscribe to the OpenShift worker nodes; the required images are made available from the marketplace. The control plane as well as infrastructure nodes remain on the standard image the installer normally uses on cloud-based installations, and thus are free of subscription fees. Billing happens on the per vCPU/hr basis metered from the running virtual machines resembling OpenShift worker nodes using the marketplace images. These images are the same RHCOS images Red Hat publishes for regular self-managed OpenShift installations and just serve as a way to measure the usage distinctly from those non-subscribed nodes for the control plane and infrastructure workloads.

The images are technically based on the RHCOS 4.8 release but work for all newer releases as well, thanks to the filesystem layering feature in RHCOS. Thus, during installation of an OpenShift 4.11 cluster, the worker nodes will get upgraded RHCOS 4.11 and run the latest and greatest stateless container operating system that underpins Red Hat OpenShift.

This allows you to pay for OpenShift subscriptions by whatever payment means you have created in your cloud provider account. More importantly, it also allows you to tap into your committed spend budget that you may have negotiated with your cloud provider. All this, while retaining the full customizability of a self-managed OpenShift installation.

On all marketplaces equally, all variants of OpenShift are offered: OpenShift Kubernetes Engine, OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Platform Plus. These complement our existing offerings of managed OpenShift services that already exist on Amazon Web Services and Azure.

For public sector customers Red Hat has also made these self-managed offerings available in the Government cloud region’s marketplaces (AWS GovCloud and Microsoft Azure Government).

Getting Support

With OpenShift procured through a cloud provider’s marketplace, your primary billing relationship remains with your cloud provider, including OpenShift subscriptions. Your support relationship is directly tied to Red Hat however. After the transaction in the marketplace, Red Hat will automatically provision the required records in your Red Hat Customer Portal account to identify you as a paying OpenShift customer, eligible for Red Hat’s award-winning enterprise support. From there on, there is no difference in customer experience compared to OpenShift subscriptions procured directly from Red Hat or a Red Hat partner.

Getting Started

Getting started with self-managed OpenShift in your preferred cloud provider environment has become even easier. All you need is an account on the Red Hat Customer Portal and your cloud provider account. Check out the links below to discover and procure OpenShift offerings from cloud provider marketplaces:

• OpenShift on the AWS Marketplace
• OpenShift on the Azure Marketplace

Among these offerings you will find detailed instruction on how to configure the OpenShift installer to use RHCOS images from these worker nodes to pay subscription fees for OpenShift as you go:

• Installing OpenShift using AWS Marketplace
• Installing OpenShift using Azure Marketplace