Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Running on Amazon EC2 FAQ

Q: What is the offering?

Similar to Microsoft Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), customers can now deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) directly from Amazon Web Services (AWS). This overcomes a number of limitations inherent in the legacy DevPay based hourly RHEL offering. Specific examples of the improvements include:
No Monthly Fee. The DevPay based Beta Hourly RHEL offering came with at $19/month recurring fee per AWS account.

• Reduced hourly pricing. In addition to the $19/month recurring fee, the DevPay based hourly offering was relatively expensive (i.e. $0.21/hour for an m1.Small)
• Supports all AWS services, including EBS, ELB, VPC and the ability for customers to have their RHEL use show up on their invoices.

Q: Which AWS Regions are available with the new on-demand RHEL offering?

ALL available Amazon regions today.

Q: What versions of RHEL are available?

Reserved Instances are available for all major versions of RHEL in both 32 and 64-bit architectures, in all Regions except AWS GovCloud.

Q: Is DevPay part of this new hourly offering?

No. This is a new offering and does not involve DevPay.

Q: What are the Hourly RHEL Prices?

For the most detailed and up to date pricing for Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux by region and instance type, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/rhel/

Q: How do customers discover the RHEL AMIs?

Full lists of RHEL AMIs are available on the RHEL AMI page. In addition, customers can find RHEL on the Quick Start menu in the AWS Management Console, along with Amazon Linux, Windows Server and SLES.

Q: Is there support for SPOT?

No, not at this time.

Q: Is there support for Reserved Instances (RI)?

Yes. We now have Reserved Instances available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Reserved Instances offer the option to make a low, one-time payment to reserve compute capacity and receive a significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance. In addition, customers who want Reserved Instances with RHEL no longer need to perform additional steps to rebuild On-Demand RHEL AMIs before they can use them on Reserved Instances. Learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux Reserved Instances, including pricing at http://aws.amazon.com/rhel/

Q: How does support work?

AWS Premium support customers can contact AWS to access a support structure from both AWS and Red Hat. AWS provides Level 1 and Level 2 support for RHEL. For Level 3 issues, AWS has an escalation process directly to Red Hat. Red Hat will work on the issue and submit the fix to AWS. AWS Premium support will close the support ticket with our customer. The customer does not need to interface with Red Hat for support.

Q: How are the base AMIs and running instances kept up to date (maintenance)?

A10: Red Hat is responsible for maintaining the base AMIs. They will do this on a periodic basis, consistent with when they update their base on-premises images. For periodic updates, Red Hat maintains update (YUM) repositories in each AWS Region. RHEL instances will have access to the regional repositories to receive incremental updates. This maintenance is included in the hourly price.

Q: Where can customers find additional details on the RHEL offerings?

You may find details here:

• Learn more about Red Hat offerings on AWS
• Learn more about Pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS

Q: What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Q: What is an AMI?

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a template that contains a software configuration (e.g., operating system, application server, and applications). From an AMI, you launch instances, which are running copies of the AMI. Learn more about AMIs on the Amazon EC2 User Guide

Q: Where may I learn more about AWS GovCloud?

You may learn more about AWS GovCloud, which is an AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud, including pricing, use cases, and service highlights at: http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

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