Red Hat, Amazon deliver Linux on demand

I think this is an interesting product, which will help bring EC2 into more businesses, but it seems to be added cost for little value for most startups.

Perhaps I'm missing the value-add that Red Hat is bringing to the equation- They're increasing the price over the standard EC2 image.. They're adding a $19/server flatfee, and then increasing the hourly cost by 10c - 16c/hr..

Granted, they're bringing their name and reputation to the party, and you can use official RHEL packages, rather than CentOS, but it doesn't seem worth it for almost any startups.

From: http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/faq/

` For Technical questions: Red Hat provides support for end-customer questions about the services. Technical issues be addressed by Red Hat associates working in concert with Amazon support and engineering in the event of issues with the EC2 infrastructure.

For Customer Service issues: All customer service issues (Billing, EC2 Account Activation, etc.) should be forwarded directly to Amazon via application-payments@amazon.com. `

It looks like it's basically RHEL branded EC2, and the extra cost is to support the RH devs and tech support. That Laudable, but probably not enough of a value-add to be worth it.

Awesome Move by Red Hat and Amazon (by Tim O'Reilly) http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/redhat_amazon_ec2....

My love for Amazon is constantly growing ... I think Amazon's services are becoming more and more interesting and innovative