Red Hat Cloud Access and pay-as-you-go cloud subscriptions are the two commercial routes for running Red Hat software on public clouds. Under Cloud Access, a customer deploys subscriptions it has already bought from Red Hat on a certified cloud provider, keeps the same Units, terms and support, and pays the provider only for infrastructure.[1][2] Under pay-as-you-go On-Demand offerings, the customer buys Red Hat software through a cloud provider’s marketplace and is billed for metered consumption, which Red Hat’s subscriptions service records in vCPU hours or core hours.[4] The first route is often described as bring your own subscription (BYOS); Red Hat’s own documents use the terms Cloud Access and Eligible Subscriptions.
Cloud Access is a contractual program defined in section 3 of Product Appendix 1. Pay-as-you-go offerings are described mainly in Red Hat’s subscription management documentation and in the marketplace listings, with the Enterprise Agreement covering data sharing for marketplace purchases.
Cloud Access
Eligibility
Appendix 1 section 3.1 allows a customer to deploy Subscriptions in a Vendor’s Cloud under Cloud Access if it has bought enough Units, provided the Subscriptions do not have Units solely based on physical attributes. The list of eligible products is kept on the Red Hat Subscription Management customer portal.[1] A Vendor is a Red Hat-authorized third party from which the customer buys cloud services and which is authorized to participate in the program; the Cloud Access landing page refers to these as Red Hat certified cloud and service providers.[2]
The RHEL subscription guide states that self-support subscriptions are not for use with Red Hat Cloud Access.[5] Physical-only products such as RHEL Server Entry Level and OpenShift Bare Metal Node subscriptions are, by their Units, tied to physical servers; the OpenShift guide allows bare-metal node subscriptions only on supported hyperscaler bare-metal instances.[7]
The guide also states that unaffiliated RHEL Server subscriptions may not be moved off-site or to a cloud environment without Red Hat’s permission (rule), and Appendix 1 section 1.2(f) requires a customer migrating to a third-party cloud or hosting provider to qualify for and follow the Cloud Access terms.[5][1]
Terms that carry over
Deploying a subscription in a Vendor’s Cloud does not change its start date or duration; when it expires, access to Subscription Services stops unless renewed.[1] The landing page states that the terms of the subscription, including pricing, remain the same, and that customers pay Red Hat for subscriptions and the cloud provider for the services used on its cloud.[2] Appendix 1 section 3.3 adds that payments to Red Hat do not include any fees owed to the Vendor, that Red Hat is not a party to the customer’s agreement with the Vendor, and that Red Hat provides support for each Eligible Subscription while noting that some components or functions may not be available or supported in a Vendor’s Cloud.
Counting continues to use the Appendix 1 Unit of the subscription. For RHEL Server that means a Socket-pair subscription covers two Virtual Nodes; the RHEL subscription guide’s public cloud worksheet divides the number of cloud instances by two and notes that these are the same subscriptions as for physical servers.[5] For self-managed OpenShift on hyperscalers, four vCPUs always count as one core-pair.[7] Red Hat publishes no conversion of cloud vCPUs to RHEL Socket-pairs.
Reporting and vendor obligations
Customers consent to the Vendor reporting their usage of Subscriptions in the Vendor’s Cloud to Red Hat (rule), and to Red Hat and the Vendor sharing information to provide Subscription Services.[1] Services or commitments that a Vendor offers in its own cloud, such as support by US-only personnel or compliance with particular legal regimes, do not apply to the Red Hat subscriptions. Red Hat may end a particular Vendor’s participation with sixty days’ notice; the customer may keep using its subscriptions for the rest of the term on another Vendor’s cloud or on premises.
Images and updates
Through Cloud Access, customers obtain software images and updates either from images provided in the Vendor’s Cloud or from a Red Hat Portal, which Appendix 1 defines to include the Customer Portal, the Red Hat Container Registry, cloud.redhat.com and Red Hat Update Infrastructure (RHUI).[1] The landing page describes two options: uploading custom images built with Red Hat image builder or other processes, or deploying Red Hat certified gold images directly from the provider’s console or CLI.[2]
Red Hat documentation defines gold images as cloud-ready Red Hat virtual machine images available in selected certified provider environments for Cloud Access customers with valid subscriptions (rule).[3] To receive them, a customer links its cloud provider account to its Red Hat account through the Integrations service of the Hybrid Cloud Console (graphical for Amazon and Azure, command line for all three providers). On AWS, gold images are built and published by Red Hat, carry the designation “Access” in the AMI name to indicate the subscription model, are published under a single Red Hat owner ID, are available in commercial regions but not in China or GovCloud (US), and are preconfigured for RHUI. They cover RHEL, RHEL for SAP, Red Hat middleware and storage images. The documentation recommends custom images instead when strict build-time requirements, such as DISA STIG partition layouts, apply.
Pay-as-you-go On-Demand
What is sold
Red Hat lists several of its products as cloud marketplace offerings. The RHEL subscription guide names RHEL Server on AWS and Microsoft Azure, RHEL for SAP Solutions on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and ELS for RHEL 7 on the same three providers.[5] The Enterprise Agreement treats cloud providers as Business Partners authorized to resell or distribute Red Hat Products, and states that when a customer buys through a marketplace, information about its use may be shared with Red Hat Affiliates, including IBM, or with the Business Partner for billing and metering (rule).[6]
How consumption is measured
Red Hat’s subscriptions service documentation describes how metered offerings are measured:[4]
| Offering | Measure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| RHEL for Third Party Linux Migration with ELS, pay-as-you-go On-Demand | vCPU hours | Currently the only RHEL On-Demand offering tracked by the service; requires metered billing through the host-metering agent or cost management (rule) |
| OpenShift Container Platform and OpenShift Dedicated 4.7 and later, On-Demand | Core hours | Only subscribed compute nodes count (rule) |
| Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, On-Demand | vCPU hours | |
| Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, pre-paid plus On-Demand | vCPU hours | Hub cluster and managed clusters’ subscribed nodes |
| OpenShift Service on AWS Hosted Control Planes, pre-paid plus On-Demand | vCPU hours and control plane hours | Dedicated control plane per cluster |
A vCPU hour is defined as availability for computational activity on one virtual core, as defined by the subscription terms, for one hour, measured to the granularity of the meter. A core hour measures cluster size in CPU cores over a range of time. The service aggregates usage into a monthly total, the unit of time used by the marketplace billing service. Some On-Demand offerings need a cloud integration configured in the Hybrid Cloud Console for data collection.
Measuring annual subscriptions in the cloud
For annual subscriptions, the subscriptions service is a reporting tool rather than a billing meter. It tracks public cloud RHEL instances in sockets, counting one instance as one socket (rule), and reports socket-based subscriptions with the socket-pair method used for RHEL.[4] For OpenShift it counts subscribed nodes, meaning nodes that can accept workloads, and notes that for OpenShift Container Platform 3.11, whose reporting cannot separate infrastructure nodes, about 15% of reported usage can be assumed to be overhead, so results up to 15% over capacity are likely still compliant. These are the tool’s conventions; the contractual count remains the Appendix 1 Unit of each subscription.
Programs
- Cloud Access: Appendix 1 section 3 program for Eligible Subscriptions.
- Pay-as-you-go On-Demand subscriptions: metered marketplace offerings.
- Red Hat Enterprise Agreement: governs both routes, including marketplace data sharing.
Out of scope
- Managed OpenShift services (Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, Azure Red Hat OpenShift, OpenShift Dedicated) and other Product Appendix 4 Online Services, beyond how their consumption is measured.
- The Certified Cloud and Service Provider partner program terms that govern providers.
- Marketplace list prices and private offers, which are set in the provider’s marketplace.
- Hosting or managed services offered to third parties, which Appendix 1 section 1.2(f) excludes from end-customer subscriptions.