Simplify Red Hat products and services on AWS with Red Hat Subscription Bundling

For customers who are modernizing their business using AWS with solutions such as Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), the OpenShift application platform itself is not be the only layer of software critical to overall customer interest. Many customers take advantage of the broader product portfolio from Red Hat to address various layers of their overall business modernization objectives. In this blog we will explore how Red Hat product subscriptions can be bundled on AWS for customer convenience.

Let’s take a moment to explore some of the add on products and services from Red Hat, how these are complementing OpenShift on AWS, and the available procurement options.

First off, OpenShift is by no means new to AWS. Customers have been building hybrid, containerized workloads going back as far as 2015 with self managed OCP. Currently however, most customers are looking for a managed offering that will allow them to focus their resources on more specific business goal aligned objectives. This leads to customers adopting the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA). ROSA provides a managed OpenShift platform where AWS and Red Hat perform the undifferentiated heavy lifting, similar to other AWS services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

We typically don’t see customers running a single OpenShift cluster, it is more common to see non-production and production clusters running in different AWS accounts. Likewise, customers will deploy clusters in different AWS regions in order to be closer to their target customers. It is also common for OpenShift customers to be in a hybrid use case. As a result there is a desire to gain visibility and control over the customer’s fleet of OpenShift clusters spanning a variety of environments. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager (RHACM) is an add-on service which is deployed via a Kubernetes operator on an OpenShift cluster and allows for management of other clusters.

Hybrid, Multi Cluster Management using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager:

Customers can also have Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security (RHACS) as part of their overall DevSecOps strategy, providing container vulnerability assessment and real time scanning of workloads across their OpenShift fleet.

DevSecOps Flow using Red Hat OpenShift Advanced Cluster Security:

Research teams and data scientists run Red Hat OpenShift AI (formerly OpenShift Data Sciences), to cater for AI/ML workloads taking advantage of the OpenShift running on AWS GPU enabled Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types.

Customers running self-managed OCP on premises may have been purchasing these and many other Red Hat products and services directly from Red Hat or a reseller and then deploying workloads where best suited to their needs and desires. In the case of ROSA the service is billed directly from AWS, and shows up as a line item n the customers AWS billing. This leads some customers to assume they need to procure ROSA and all the above products and services individually, or otherwise purchase Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus which would bundle many of these into a single offer. This method of individual subscription procurement is not desirable because it is granular and painful. Customers would then need to manage the software and subscription life cycles in a granular manner.

So what if customers were able to simplify Red Hat subscription bundling and get extra benefits?
Red Hat has created a Red Hat Subscriptions AWS Marketplace listing which allows customers to bundle and select all their desired Red Hat investments and get a negotiated private offer from Red Hat. This allows for a similar product and service bundling as a traditional enterprise agreement however without the risk of purchasing self managed OpenShift (OCP) subscriptions which can not be used on managed OpenShift (ROSA) and customers get benefits from AWS marketplace.

Customer can benefit from unified billing, seeing their Red Hat related software subscriptions as a line item on their AWS bill. Enterprise customers with with Enterprise discount program (EDP) agreements which allow for discounted rates on AWS services such as EC2, RDS, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) based on a pre-committed spend, can have their Red Hat software subscriptions count toward their spend commitment. This translates to discounted rates with a lower investment.

Red Hat has also created regional listings in order to cater for localized tax implications: Red Hat Subscriptions listing for NAMER, Red Hat Subscriptions listing for EMEA.

Once subscriptions have been procured customers can deploy these with easy on their ROSA clusters using the OpenShift Operator Hub.

Want to dive deeper?
In order to take full advantage of the best negotiated rate it is recommended that you reach out to your AWS or Red Hat account team and start a discussion about the private offers available via AWS Marketplace. Alternatively you can drop an email directly to the AWS Partner team supporting Red Hat.

Related:
What is Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security (RHACS) | Amazon Web Services
Managing Clusters with Red Hat Advanced cluster Managed (RHACM) | Amazon Web Services
Orchestrating Multi-Region Apps with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management and Submariner