Focus on cloud initiatives with Red Hat and Microsoft

Deploy an operating system that supports your cloud business goals

Across industries, organizations are moving to cloud environments to achieve digital business goals. In fact, 72% of organizations have a hybrid cloud strategy in place, and 50% of enterprise workloads run in a public cloud today.¹

Choosing an operating system (OS) and cloud provider are strategic decisions. Your OS forms the foundation for your entire environment—security, management, portability, and lifecycle planning start with the OS. And your ability to scale flexibly, maintain availability, and deliver resilient services is heavily influenced by your cloud provider.

Standardizing on a single operating foundation across your datacenter and cloud environments can greatly simplify your path to the cloud. Rather than splitting operations and management into separate domains, your teams can use a single set of tools and platforms to deploy, run, safeguard, and move applications and workloads across multiple footprints.

Even so, not all combinations of OSs and cloud providers offer the features, capabilities, and resources to operate effectively and efficiently in hybrid cloud environments. Consistency, security, manageability, interoperability, and support across your entire environment are critical for making the most of your cloud investments.

Combining Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® for Microsoft Azure delivers value for your organization by providing a flexible, stable, and reliable foundation for innovation. The cloud-ready, security-focused OS provides a consistent, tailored experience across environments, while sustainable, trusted cloud infrastructure from Microsoft gives you global capacity, reliable operations, and innovative services. Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux across both datacenter and Microsoft Azure environments can help you improve productivity, security, and operations as you adapt to a digital world.

No matter where you are in your cloud journey, Red Hat and Microsoft can help you gain control of hybrid cloud complexity. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Microsoft Azure gives you access to:

• Flexible consumption models and purchasing options.
• Integrated, enterprise support and expertise from Red Hat and Microsoft, including access to Red Hat’s award-winning support.
• Proactive analytics and management tools and services.
• Security certifications, tools, and resources.
• Developer tools and programs.
• Optimized offerings for Microsoft SQL Server and SAP deployments.

How to purchase, deploy, and use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure

Red Hat solutions are designed for hybrid cloud environments so you can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux wherever needed. Red Hat and Microsoft offer multiple purchasing options to fit your organization’s procurement processes.

• Purchase subscriptions from Red Hat and use them on site or on Microsoft Azure via Red Hat Cloud Access.
• Obtain Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances from the Azure Marketplace.
• Use your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) and Azure Hybrid Benefit discounts for Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances on Microsoft Azure.
• Use the Red Hat Hybrid Committed Spend program for discounted pricing and flexible payment options on site and on Microsoft Azure.

Red Hat product teams worked closely with Microsoft to create a cloud-optimized version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for hybrid environments that include Azure infrastructure. This offering brings together a leading Linux OS with built-in Azure-specific configurations that ensure performance, integration, and observability for your cloud workloads so you can focus on initiatives that move your business forward, rather than spending time on operational tasks.

Benefits of cloud-optimized Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Microsoft Azure

• Save time with a pretuned image that is ready to run. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Microsoft Azure is well integrated and preconfigured for performance with Azure-specific profiles. Organizations that spin up and spin down images frequently benefit from having persistent settings so images are the same every time a new one is spun up.
• Monitor Red Hat Enterprise Linux within Azure resources and applications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Azure gives administrators the ability to collect, analyze, and visualize performance and diagnostic data through Azure Monitor.
• Use built-in management tools to speed operations.
  • Azure CLI (azure-cli) provides command line interface management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Azure images and resources.
  • Provide proactive alerts of impending outages, security events, or overspending. With Red Hat Lightspeed (formerly Red Hat Insights), you can manage cloud and on-premise environments in a single interface.
  • Get access to Red Hat’s decades of Linux expertise with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed provides proactive guidance on how to build, deploy, and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux using AI technologies.
• Simplify the process of building, deploying, and managing workloads in the cloud.
  • Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses container-native tooling so organizations can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a bootc container image, helping streamline cloud-native application development and IT operations into a single pipeline.
  • Image attestation and top-down memory encryption through secure boot, confidential compute, and a confidential hypervisor provides streamlined deployment and enhanced security from boot to runtime.
  • Enhance security by reducing attack surface with immutable system images.
  • Streamline operations with optional automated updates and rollbacks—just like your smartphone.
  • Azure Confidential VM (CVM) ensures that customer data in transit, in use, and at rest are protected on the running VM.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings provide superior cloud-optimized integration, security, and manageability and lay the foundation for standardization. As always, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a consistent platform across clouds and on-premise environments, between development and production environments, and for a wide range of workloads. Whether you are migrating existing subscriptions to the cloud or deploying a new instance directly from Azure Marketplace, Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes it user-friendly to get up and running on your cloud of choice.

Read the consumption commitment to learn more about purchasing options and how to use your committed Azure spending for Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Azure cloud infrastructure.

Integrated, enterprise support and expertise from Red Hat and Microsoft

Regardless of how you purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you are backed by Red Hat’s award-winning support organization in coordination with Microsoft’s support teams. Red Hat and Microsoft work together to provide expertise, knowledge, and support to ensure you successfully accomplish your goals and get the most out of your subscriptions and cloud spending. We provide integrated support for customers running Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure, and this complete support experience features multilingual engineers across 18 regions, colocated staff for providing joint support, an integrated ticketing system, and coordinated escalation and resolution processes. You receive the same high-value experience whether you get Red Hat Enterprise Linux directly from Red Hat or through Microsoft.

You can choose from several levels of support to meet the needs of different teams—and your budget. For example, you may choose self-support for development systems and premium 24x7 support for production systems. Red Hat support teams work closely with Red Hat engineering and product teams, as well as other partners like SAP, to solve issues with less hassle. Specialty-based routing ensures support calls and tickets go directly to the right experts. Red Hat also publishes solutions from support cases, compiling them into helpful documentation on the Red Hat Customer Portal. Red Hat Customer Portal is your access point for reference architectures, best practices, product documentation, collaborative discussion, labs, and tools.

Streamline operations and management across your hybrid cloud

Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Azure lets you use the same set of management tools to administer your datacenter and cloud environments, saving time and effort. For example, you can deploy Azure Arc-enabled servers outside of Azure and manage them as Azure resources.

Red Hat Lightspeed is included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and it is a unique suite of hosted services that helps you manage and optimize your hybrid cloud environment, enhancing your subscription with AI-powered management and advanced security capabilities. Gain visibility into business operations and security risks to identify and mitigate issues across your infrastructure before they affect your bottom line. Red Hat Lightspeed works across on-site and cloud environments, so you can manage everything from a single interface. To further simplify operations, you can link your Red Hat account to your cloud provider account and automatically connect your cloud systems and workloads to Red Hat Lightspeed and other Red Hat upon provisioning. Red Hat Lightspeed offers key capabilities for hybrid cloud environments.

• Subscriptions service. Track and optimize your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription across your entire environment.
• Resource optimization service. Right-size your Azure deployments using central processing unit (CPU), memory, and input/output (I/O) performance metrics that tell you whether your systems are optimized, undersized, oversized, under pressure, or idling.
• Image builder service. Create, manage, and deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux images consistently and rapidly across your datacenter and Azure environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes certified gold images to speed deployment.
• Vulnerability service. Scan your systems for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and access prioritized remediation guidance.
• Compliance and policies services. Set policies and track adherence to compliance requirements across systems, regardless of where they run.
• Malware service. Detect malware in your systems, regardless of where they are deployed.
• Advisor service. Rapidly identify operational risks, and other issues identified by Microsoft, across large-scale environments and access prioritized remediation guidance.
• Deviation service. Identify configuration inconsistencies that can lead to performance, availability, security, and compliance issues.
• Patch service. Manage patching across all Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems in your environment.

Effectively manage Microsoft Azure environments and learn how to use Red Hat Lightspeed in your Microsoft Azure environment.

Maintain security and compliance in the cloud

Red Hat and Microsoft build advanced security features into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Azure. This gives you the consistency you need to maintain a security-focused and compliant cloud environment. Red Hat and Microsoft security response teams work together and in collaboration with customers, partners, and the global open source community to identify and resolve vulnerabilities.

Built-in operating security features like live kernel patching, security profiles, security standards certification, and a trusted software supply chain help you meet high security and compliance expectations. A modular package structure reduces your attack surface and protects your systems in a cloud, and default settings will configure your systems for increased security from the start. Automated tools, regular updates and patch releases, and accessible expertise safeguard your environment. Red Hat Lightspeed compliance service helps you track your organization’s adherence to compliance requirements across your environments and provides remediation guidance to stay compliant over time. Additionally, an identity management tool is included so you can adopt zero trust architectures more readily.

Using industry-standard encryption protocols, Microsoft Azure safeguards your data as it travels to, from, and within Microsoft datacenters, as well as at rest in Azure Storage. Within Microsoft Azure, you can turn on security management and threat protection for Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a default. These settings deliver built-in behavioral analytics and machine learning to identify attacks and Zero day exploits. In addition, Microsoft Azure monitors Red Hat virtual machine networks and cloud services for known attack patterns and post-breach activity.

Support your developers no matter where they work

Adopting a common platform like Red Hat Enterprise Linux for development, test, and production environments shortens time to launch for new applications and reduces incompatibility and other risks at launch. Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers access to reliable OS images in the cloud in addition to the toolchains, libraries, container tools, and runtimes you need to streamline the path from development to production. Updates are delivered via application streams, allowing developers and IT architects to experiment with the latest tools, runtime languages, and databases while still maintaining earlier versions of production applications.

Red Hat also offers developer-specific resources, programs, and subscriptions to help organizations develop on Red Hat Enterprise Linux more easily and cost-effectively:

• Red Hat Developer program
• Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals
• Red Hat Developer Subscription for Teams

These programs can be used both in your datacenter and in your Microsoft Azure environment.

Gain more value from your cloud OS

Standardizing on a flexible, stable, and reliable OS across hybrid cloud environments can simplify your cloud journey. Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Microsoft Azure gives you a consistent, manageable, and security-focused foundation for getting the most value from your cloud investments.

Learn how Red Hat and Microsoft collaborate to help you get value from Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure.