Chapter 1. About Simple Content Access

Simple Content Access is a set of capabilities that enables a change in the way Red Hat manages its subscription and entitlement enforcement model. This model of content access and consumption results in fewer barriers to content deployment.

With Simple Content Access, the enforcement model changes from a per-system requirement, where you must attach a subscription to a system before you can access content, to a per-organization and per-account requirement, where you can access content on a system without attaching a subscription to that system.

Because of the added freedom and flexibility to consume content that Simple Content Access provides, and in the absence of strict entitlement enforcement from the classic entitlement-based subscription model, it becomes important for you to keep track of how you are using your subscriptions. With subscription services, Red Hat provides additional tooling to help you with tracking and compliance. Subscription services is a reporting solution that provides account-wide visibility of both subscription usage and utilization and aids in self-governance of your entire subscription profile.

When Simple Content Access and subscription services are used together, they enable a different and more flexible subscription experience. Overall, this experience removes or improves many of the high-overhead and complicated business processes that are associated with the classic Red Hat entitlement-based enforcement subscription model:

You can choose to use neither, either, or both of these services. However, Simple Content Access and subscription services are designed as complementary services and function best when they are used in tandem.

The foundational benefit of Simple Content Access is that it offers a less restrictive and more flexible way to consume your Red Hat subscriptions. However, this flexibility does include some limitations.

Simple Content Access is designed to improve the overall customer subscription experience by eliminating cumbersome and confusing parts of the subscription management workflow. With Simple Content Access enabled, that action changes not only the user workflows that manage your subscriptions and provide access to content, but it also changes the way that the various subscription tools themselves operate. These tools include Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Subscription Management, the subscription-manager command line tool, activation keys, virt-who, and others.

For the most recent information that describes the differences between the old entitlement-based workflow and the Simple Content Access workflow, see the information about operational changes in Additional resources.