Announcing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 on Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon AppStream 2.0

At AWS, we love to give our customers choices: the choice of infrastructure to deploy your workloads, to store your most important data, or the operating systems for your virtual desktops.

Many of you choose Amazon WorkSpaces to provision and distribute virtual desktops securely and at scale to your workforce. Our customers choose WorkSpaces when choosing a solution to enable secure remote workers or when they want to quickly provision desktop for contractors, just to name two use cases. And many of you also choose Amazon AppStream 2.0, to provide your users with non-persistent virtual desktops or specific published applications.

We are happy to announce that customers are now able to provision Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 Workstation desktops for WorkSpaces Personal and AppStream 2.0.

Customers operating in highly regulated industries such as defense, government, and financial services often run production workloads on RHEL. This is because it includes security features such as SELinux, and has extensive security certifications. For developers to work in an environment that is consistent with the production environment, they run the operating system locally on their workstation or on self-managed virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). These customers have asked for RHEL on WorkSpaces for this reason.

Similarly, engineers, and data scientists who require on-demand access to RHEL environments run it locally or on self-managed VDI. Supporting a fleet of workstations running the operating system locally and self-managed VDI are resource intensive and limit IT’s ability to quickly respond to the needs of the business. In addition, purchasing high-end workstations, infrastructure, and RHEL subscriptions for each user is time-consuming for IT. With WorkSpaces and AppStream 2.0, you can now deliver RHEL 8 to your end users with cloud APIs for maximum flexibility and a short onboarding cycle.

Getting Started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 on Amazon WorkSpaces Personal

You can provision RHEL 8 WorkSpaces in the WorkSpaces console by selecting a Red Hat Enterprise Linux based public bundle during launch.

In the WorkSpaces console, in the Personal tab, select the orange Create WorkSpaces button in the top right. On Step 1, Onboarding, select I know what workspace options I need for my use case. On Step 2, Configure WorkSpace, choose a Personal WorkSpace under WorkSpace Type. In the Bundle section, select the drop-down menu, and then enter Red Hat. You will then see the preconfigured Red Hat bundles, and can select one based on your vCPU and memory requirements.

After creating your initial RHEL 8 WorkSpace, you can log in to it, install and customize applications, and then create an image. After making a custom bundle with your new image, you can deploy this bundle to your end users. For more information, see Create a custom WorkSpaces image and bundle for WorkSpaces Personal.

End users connect to their WorkSpace using the free Amazon WorkSpaces client, available here, or via WorkSpaces Web Access. To connect, the user will need to provide a registration code. This code will either be delivered to them by email (if using AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory) or manually by your organization (if using self-managed Active Directory and AD Connector).

After connecting, the end user will see the welcome wizard for the desktop:

The desktop for each end user is persistent, meaning that if they disconnect or reboot, they will reconnect to the same WorkSpace. Applications, settings, and preferences will remain as configured for the life of the WorkSpace. Only the assigned user will be connected to the specified WorkSpace, so users can remain confident their environment will remain as they have left it.

Getting Started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for AppStream 2.0

To get started with RHEL 8 on AppStream, begin by navigating to the Images section of the AppStream 2.0 console, and then select the Image Builder tab at the top center. Choose the orange Launch Image builder button in the top right.

In the resulting screen, you will see a search box, with the prompt Filter by attribute or keyword. Select this box. A properties box will pop up, with suggested filters. Select Platform, Equals, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. This will show you the RHEL 8 images you can use to create your image builder.

After creating your RHEL 8 image builder, you can log in to it, install and customize your applications, and then create an image for use in an AppStream 2.0 fleet. For more information, see Tutorial: Create a Custom Linux-Based AppStream 2.0 Image.

End users connect to the AppStream 2.0 fleet via a web browser or the AppStream 2.0 client for Windows. Their authentication method will vary depending on which user authentication method you have chosen for your AppStream stack.

RHEL 8 on AppStream 2.0 includes support for two new major features for a Linux distribution on AppStream 2.0. The first is optional support for Active Directory. You can choose to join your RHEL image builders and fleets to an Active Directory domain for central authentication and user identity management.

The second major new feature is support for Certificate Based Authentication (CBA). CBA is an optional feature available to customers who use Active Directory. Without CBA, after a user logs in with SAML, they must supply their Active Directory credentials within the streaming session. With CBA, after a user logs in with SAML, they are automatically fully logged in to streaming session. CBA enables a fully seamless login experience for the end user.

Things to Know

RHEL 8 WorkSpaces use our WSP streaming protocol, and RHEL 8 AppStream 2.0 instances use our DCV streaming protocol. These protocols provide high performance and fully-encrypted end-to-end transit and authentication.

On WorkSpaces Personal, RHEL 8 is available for all non-graphics bundles. On AppStream 2.0, it is available for all non-graphics instance types, as well as Graphics G4 and Graphics G5 instances.

Availability and Pricing

For information on regions and pricing, see our pricing pages for Amazon WorkSpaces Personal and Amazon AppStream 2.0, along with the AWS Pricing Calculator.

Dan is a Senior AWS End User Compute Solutions Architect, focusing on helping customers configure and optimize end-user computing solutions. Dan also focuses on EC2, Microsoft, and Linux based workloads. Dan has been at AWS since March 2016, and was a Premium Support escalation engineer and Specialist Technical Account Manager prior to becoming a specialist Solutions Architect.