Amazon offers Red Hat on-demand

Amazon has teamed with open source vendor, Red Hat to launch Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

The offering makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux available as an on-demand web service through Amazon data centres and network infrastructure, 'in the cloud'.

Amazon EC2 is part of Red Hat's ongoing strategy to bring increased automation to enterprise-scale delivery of the Linux operating system (OS) and infrastructure, simplifying the running and management of applications on the OS.

EC2 is Amazon's web-based service for hosting business applications for customers and the Red Hat service is the first to be commercially supported OS offered through it.

The new service will support the 3,400 applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise and also offer Linux Red Hat Network management service and technical support.

Red Hat said the service would allow customers to increase or decrease capacity on an ad-hoc basis, removing the need to over-buy software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand.

Donald Fischer, vice president of Online Services at Red Hat said the offering would appeal to developers or customers looking to deploy web-scale services and businesses that require rapidly scaled compute resources, quickly and cost-effectively.

"The marriage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Amazon's EC2 service makes the promise of professional web scale computing a reality," he said.

The launch is marked by the release of a private beta, made available yesterday, and a public beta is due to be made available before the end of the year.

Prices for the service start at $19 (9.03) a month, per user and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 for every computer hour used on the EC2 services, depending on the size, bandwidth and storage fees of the services purchased.