Red Hat has recently announced a revised pricing tied to vCPU count for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deployments across major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The updated pricing will be effective on April 1st and has sparked concerns among certain users.
Designed to align more effectively with the increasing number of public cloud instance sizes, the new pricing model introduces similar RHEL units of measure and pricing structures for both on-premises and public cloud environments and applies to all cloud partners participating in the RH-CCSP (Certified Cloud Service Provider) program. Currently, the pricing for public cloud deployment follows a straightforward two-tiered model for "small" and "large" virtual machines. Gunnar Hellekson, VP at Red Hat, writes:
The new RHEL pricing to cloud partners will scale by vCPU count, which is consistent with the most common model for cloud virtual machines (VMs) and software. In general, we anticipate that the new RHEL pricing to cloud partners will be lower than the current pricing for small VM/instance sizes; at parity for some small and medium VM/instance sizes; and potentially higher than the current pricing for large and very large VM/instance sizes.
In a Reddit thread, the majority of developers voiced their concerns about the modification and the potential increase in costs, with a user writing:
It's a price increase intended to drive profits, with a bunch of weasel wordage like "Streamline cloud procurement processes and remove friction as customers grow and scale their cloud footprint with new AI-driven cloud carbon-nanotube graphene blockchain synergy technology."
Transitioning from a per-hour to a per-second model, this pricing adjustment will help customers implement auto-scaling and elasticity in their deployments. Discussing two distinct pricing scenarios, AWS acknowledges that users of RHEL-based r5.xlarge instances (4-vCPU) will experience a slight price reduction, while users of larger instances, such as r6a.8xlarge (32-vCPU), will see a notable increase in costs.
AWS separately confirms that the change will impact different Red Hat options offered by AWS, including RHEL, RHEL HA, RHEL SQL Server, RHEL HA SQL Server, RHEL for SAP, and RHEL Workstation, all of which are transitioning to the new vCPU-based pricing. Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, comments:
"The new RHEL pricing to cloud partners will scale by vCPU count, which is consistent with the most common model for cloud virtual machines (VMs) and software" twenty years ago.
The only exceptions on AWS are compute savings plans or reserved instances purchased before April 1st which will continue to be billed on the old prices for the agreed-upon term and are seen by the cloud provider as a means to optimize RHEL spending.
Google Cloud offers a document that addresses support, migration, and licenses when running RHEL on Compute Engine. The complete list of affected RHEL cloud partners can be found on the Red Hat site.