Red Hat has launched a private beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud for those users who want to scale up their applications without having to build out their own physical infrastructure. This move is only one component of Red Hat's "Linux automation" strategy aimed at delivering a Linux infrastructure Red Hat has launched a private beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud for those users who want to scale up their applications without having to build out their own physical infrastructure. This move is only one component of Red Hat’s “Linux automation” strategy aimed at delivering a Linux infrastructure that simplifies how applications operate and are managed.The collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (including the Red Hat Network management service, its technical support and over 3,400 certified applications) available to customers on Amazon’s network. This combination changes the economics of computing by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that are actually used. And since customers can easily increase or decrease capacity within minutes, it removes the need to over subscribe software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand.“In collaboration with Amazon Web Services, we are now able to offer customers yet another choice in how they deploy the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. This offering will be appealing to developers, customers looking to quickly and cost-effectively deploy web-scale services and businesses that require rapidly scaled compute resources,” said Donald Fischer, vice president of Online Services at Red Hat. “The marriage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Amazon’s EC2 service makes the promise of professional web scale computing a reality.” In a statement, Red Hat said that the base price for RHEL on Amazon’s EC2 will be $19 per month, per user and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 for every compute hour used on Amazon’s EC2 service, depending on whether customers choose a small, large or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and storage fees.Today, this service is available as a private beta, however, the company hopes to have a public beta ready and available before the end of the year. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.More information on this offering can be found by going here. Software Development