Chapter 1. Introducing RHEL on public cloud platforms

• Deploying public cloud instances is very effective for flexibly increasing and decreasing the active computing power of your deployments, also known as scaling up and scaling down. Therefore, using RHEL on public cloud is recommended in the following scenarios:

  • Clusters with high peak workloads and low general performance requirements. Scaling up and down based on your demands can be highly efficient in terms of resource costs.
  • Quickly setting up or expanding your clusters. This avoids high upfront costs of setting up local servers.
• Cloud instances are not affected by what happens in your local environment. Therefore, you can use them for backup and disaster recovery.

• You are running an existing environment that cannot be adjusted. Customizing a cloud instance to fit the specific needs of an existing deployment may not be cost-effective in comparison with your current host platform.
• You are operating with a hard limit on your budget. Maintaining your deployment in a local data center typically provides less flexibility but more control over the maximum resource costs than the public cloud does.

Next steps

• Obtaining RHEL for public cloud deployments

• Instead of private orchestration interfaces, public cloud instances use provider-specific console interfaces for managing your cloud resources.
• Certain features, such as nested virtualization, may not work correctly. If a specific feature is critical for your deployment, check the feature’s compatibility in advance with your chosen public cloud provider.

• Your public cloud provider is responsible for the security of the cloud hypervisor
• Red Hat provides the security features of the RHEL guest operating systems in your instances
• You manage the specific security settings and practices in your cloud infrastructure

• To create the system image, you can use the RHEL image builder or you can build the image manually.
• This method uses your existing RHEL subscription, and is also referred to as bring your own subscription (BYOS).
• You pre-pay a yearly subscription, and you can use your Red Hat customer discount.
• Your customer service is provided by Red Hat.
• For creating multiple images effectively, you can use the cloud-init tool.

• You post-pay an hourly rate for using the service. Therefore, this method is also referred to as pay as you go (PAYG).
• Your customer service is provided by the cloud platform provider.