1.2. Public cloud use cases for RHEL
Deploying on a public cloud provides many benefits, but might not be the most efficient solution in every scenario. If you are evaluating whether to migrate your RHEL deployments to the public cloud, consider whether your use case will benefit from the advantages of the public cloud.
- Beneficial use cases
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, you can use RHEL on public cloud 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.
- What happens in your local environment does not affect cloud instances. Therefore, you can use them for backup and disaster recovery.
- Potentially problematic use cases
- You are running an existing environment that you cannot adjust. Customizing a cloud instance to fit the specific needs of an existing deployment might not be economically efficient 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.
For details on how to obtain RHEL for public cloud deployments, see Obtaining RHEL for public cloud deployments.