Red Hat handed out a new permission slip first thing Tuesday morning, saying that its Advanced Platform Premium and Server Premium subscribers are entitled to Red Hat Cloud Access.
In other words, they’re free to move their supported RHEL widgetry between traditional on-premise servers and Amazon Web Services via EC2. Other Certified Cloud Providers will follow in due course.
Red Hat’s been beta’ing RHEL on Amazon for two-and-a-half years now. Product strategy director Mike Ferris called it a beta as in business model.
A couple of strings with the Cloud Access program though. The fine print says to qualify customers need a minimum of 25 “active, unused” subscriptions and a direct (L1-L3) relationship with Red Hat support. Third-party support makes them ineligible. Red Hat Academic Program and desktop customers can’t cut it either.
Red Hat will be keeping tabs on the number of subscriptions that are used in the cloud and says “once subscriptions are moved to the cloud, they must remain there for a minimum of six months.”