Red Hat recently revealed updated prices for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deployments across key cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, based on the number of virtual CPUs.

Some consumers are concerned about the revised cost, which takes effect on April 1.

The new pricing model, which is applicable to all cloud partners taking part in the RH-CCSP (Certified Cloud Service Provider) program, introduces comparable RHEL units of measure and pricing structures for both on-premises and public cloud environments. It is designed to better align with the growing number of public cloud instance sizes. For now, there is a simple two-tiered price structure for public cloud deployment for "small" and "large" virtual machines.

This pricing change, which converts the model from one based on hours to one based on seconds, will assist clients in implementing elasticity and auto-scaling in their deployments. Speaking about two different pricing scenarios, AWS notes that customers using RHEL-based r5.xlarge instances (4-vCPU) will pay a little less, whereas customers using larger instances, like r6a.8xlarge (32-vCPU), will pay a significant amount more.

Amazon separately attests to the fact that the modification will affect various Red Hat options that it offers, such as RHEL, RHEL HA, RHEL SQL Server, RHEL HA SQL Server, RHEL for SAP, and RHEL Workstation, all of which are moving toward the new vCPU-based pricing. 

The cloud provider views these as a way to optimize RHEL spending. The only exceptions on AWS are compute savings plans or reserved instances that were purchased prior to April 1st and will continue to be billed at the previous rates for the duration of the agreement.

When using Compute Engine to run RHEL, Google Cloud provides a document that covers licenses, migration, and support.