Red Hat is updating its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) cloud pricing model for all cloud service providers in the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider (CCSP) program, including AWS. Please refer to Red Hat’s announcement for more details. As a result, AWS customers will see their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) price change for RHEL-based EC2 instances effective July 1, 2024. As a result, AWS customers will see their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) price change for RHEL-based EC2 instances effective July 1, 2024.

With this pricing update, RHEL-based EC2 instances will move from per-hour to per-second billing, which will remove the cost of unused minutes and seconds from your bill.

Due to the change in RHEL OS price, the RHEL-based EC2 instance price will change. Your RHEL-based EC2 instance cost will change based on your instance mix. The vCPU-based pricing scales with instance size. If you primarily use smaller vCPU RHEL-based EC2 instances (<12 vCPUs) your cost will likely decrease, and if most of your usage is on larger vCPU instances (> 12 vCPUs) your cost will increase.

Red Hat products offered by AWS such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), RHEL HA, RHEL SQL Server, RHEL HA SQL Server, RHEL for SAP with HA and Update Services, and RHEL Workstation are moving to the new vCPU-based RHEL pricing.

Yes, this price change will impact EC2 RHEL prices on all EC2 instance types, all consumption models, and all Commercial and GovCloud regions. You will see the price change for RHEL-based EC2 instances effective July 1, 2024 1^st, 2024. The new pricing will apply to all RHEL on-demand and EC2 Spot instance usage, and to new RHEL EC2 Savings Plans or EC2 Reserved Instances purchased on or after July 1, 2024, 2024. Any RHEL EC2 Savings Plans (Compute or Instance Savings Plans) or EC2 Reserved Instances that were purchased prior to July 1, 2024 will be unaffected by this price change, they will continue to be billed on the old prices for the term of the individual EC2 Savings Plan or EC2 Reserved Instance purchases. However, note that any new rates (such as new regions or new instance types) launched after July 1, 2024, 2024, will be on the new RHEL pricing, even if the Savings Plans were purchased prior to July 1, 2024, 2024. 

As mentioned by Red Hat in their announcement, the new RHEL pricing will scale by vCPU count. Therefore, the pricing will change based on the instance size (number of vCPUs) for all instance types. We have provided below tables that you can use to estimate the impact to your RHEL instance usage on EC2 for RHEL, RHEL HA, RHEL for SAP with HA and Update Services, and RHEL Workstation. The impact to RHEL SQL and RHEL HA SQL will be the same as RHEL and RHEL HA respectively. The table below shows the dollar per hour change in instance price, and can be used to estimate the impact to your RHEL-based On-demand, Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Instance Savings Plan, EC2 Reserved Instances, and EC2 Spot usage.

Example 1: You have 5000 hours of RHEL-based r5.xlarge instance usage per month. R5.xlarge is a 4-vCPU instance, and this means your per hour cost will go down by $0.0024, and your total cost will go down by $12 per month (5000x$0.0024).

Example 2: You have 5000 hours of RHEL-based r6a.8xlarge instance usage per month. R6a.8xlarge is a 32-vCPU instance, which means your per hour costs will go up by $0.2156, or $1078 per month (5000x$0.2156).

In general, we have the following recommendations:

• New RHEL price is effective on July 1, 2024. Any Compute or Instance Savings Plans (SPs) purchased before that will continue to be on old RHEL pricing. If your RHEL-based EC2 instance costs are going up you can consider purchasing SPs prior to July 1, 2024 to increase your SP coverage and lock-in the old RHEL pricing for the duration of the SP. You can view your AWS Savings Plans recommendations via the AWS Cost Management console. SPs will apply as per the default behavior, which is to calculate your potential savings percentage for each combination of eligible usage and then apply to your highest savings percentage first and continue to apply until there is no more remaining usage or your commitment is exhausted. Learn more about how SPs apply here.
• Optimize instance mix for EC2 RHEL so as to use more smaller instance sizes. With the new pricing model, RHEL OS cost is proportional to the number of vCPUs. As the prices for smaller instances (<12 vCPUs) are going down, you can optimize your usage mix to use more smaller instances and reduce costs.
• AWS can provide RHEL volume discounts in exchange for an annual spend commitment. Please work with your Technical Account Manager to assess if you qualify.

If you have further questions, please reach out to AWS Support or to your Account Manager. 

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