Amazon EC2 Spot Now Available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Posted on: Jul 25, 2019

Starting today, you can launch Amazon EC2 Spot Instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on base Red Hat Enterprise Linux Images (AMIs). Previously, only customers with existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux Premium subscriptions could launch Amazon EC2 Spot Instances running RHEL (i.e. the bring your own license model). Spot Instances can now be launched through RHEL’s basic subscription model and are included in the hourly Spot Instance price.

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity available in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and other test & development workloads. Spot Instances are easy to launch, scale and manage through AWS services like Amazon ECS and Amazon EMR, or integrated third parties like Terraform and Jenkins.

Spot Instances can be launched via RunInstances API with a single additional parameter. You can also provision compute capacity across Spot Instances, RIs and On-Demand instances to optimize performance and cost using EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet APIs.  

To learn more about Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, visit Amazon EC2 Spot page or technical documentation.