Amazon Web Services to offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-demand

Red Hat has extended its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a move that will give enterprises the flexibility to buy and deploy Linux-based software through the cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will be made available in the coming weeks through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service, the firm said.

"Giving developers broad access to RHEL using Amazon EC2 is an important step in our evolution in the cloud," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager for cloud business at Red Hat.

"This is about giving customers and developers choice in how they deploy RHEL and work to build the industry's next-generation applications."

The partnership is also important for Amazon as it looks to rebuild customer confidence in AWS after recent high-profile outages.

"We are pleased to offer supported enterprise-class RHEL on-demand for our customers," said Terry Wise, director of business development at AWS.

"Our customers have been vocal about their need to provision supported RHEL in the same way that they provision AWS EC2 and only pay for what they use."

However, AWS' turbulent 2011 looks set to continue after SAP recently blamed the cloud company for the industry's difficult in selling software-as-a-service products.

Earlier this week, Red Hat unveiled platforms designed to expand the range of open cloud services for administrators and developers.

Red Hat's CloudForms and OpenShift systems will allow enterprises and developers to work with public and private clouds that support Red Hat's Linux and JBoss platforms, the firm said.