RHEL Pricing update for Amazon Web Services China regions

Red Hat is updating its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) cloud pricing model for all cloud service providers in the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider (CCSP) program, including Amazon Web Services. Please refer to Red Hat’s announcement for more details. As a result, customers in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD will see their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) price change for RHEL-based EC2 instances effective Oct 1, 2024.

Due to the change in RHEL OS price, the RHEL-based EC2 instance price will change. Your RHEL-based EC2 instance cost will change based on your instance mix. The vCPU-based pricing scales with instance size. If you primarily use smaller vCPU RHEL-based EC2 instances (<12 vCPUs) your cost will likely decrease, and if most of your usage is on larger vCPU instances (> 12 vCPUs) your cost will increase.

Red Hat products offered by Amazon Web Services China Regions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), RHEL HA, RHEL SQL Server, and RHEL HA SQL Server are moving to the new vCPU-based RHEL pricing.

Yes, this price change will impact EC2 RHEL prices on all EC2 instance types and all consumption models. You will see the price change for RHEL-based EC2 instances effective Oct 1, 2024. The new pricing will apply to all RHEL on-demand usage, and to new RHEL EC2 Savings Plans or EC2 Reserved Instances purchased on or after Oct 1, 2024. Any RHEL EC2 Savings Plans (Compute or Instance Savings Plans) or EC2 Reserved Instances that were purchased prior to Oct 1, 2024 will be unaffected by this price change, they will continue to be billed on the old prices for the term of the individual EC2 Savings Plan or EC2 Reserved Instance purchases. However, note that any new rates (such as new regions or new instance types) launched after Oct 1, 2024, will be on the new RHEL pricing, even if the Savings Plans were purchased prior to Oct 1, 2024.

As mentioned by Red Hat in their announcement, the new RHEL pricing will scale by vCPU count. Therefore, the pricing will change based on the instance size (number of vCPUs) for all instance types. We have provided below tables that you can use to estimate the impact to your RHEL instance usage on EC2 for RHEL, and RHEL HA. The impact to RHEL SQL and RHEL HA SQL will be the same as RHEL and RHEL HA respectively. The table below shows the prices per hour change in instance price, and can be used to estimate the impact to your RHEL-based On-demand, Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Instance Savings Plan, and EC2 Reserved Instances.

Example 1: You have 5000 hours of RHEL-based r5.xlarge instance usage per month. r5.xlarge is a 4-vCPU instance in Ningxia Region, and this means your per hour cost will go down by ¥0.016, and your total cost will go down by ¥80 per month (5000x¥0.016).

Example 2: You have 5000 hours of RHEL-based r5a.8xlarge instance usage per month in Ningxia Region. r5a.8xlarge is a 32-vCPU instance, which means your per hour costs will go up by ¥1.476, or ¥7380 per month (5000x¥1.476).

* Note: The prices in this table are estimates provided as illustrations of the potential impact from the RHEL pricing update.

In general, we have the following recommendations:

• New RHEL price is effective on Oct 1 2024. Any Compute or Instance Savings Plans (SPs) purchased before that will continue to be on old RHEL pricing. If your RHEL-based EC2 instance costs are going up you can consider purchasing SPs prior to Oct 1 2024 to increase your SP coverage and lock-in the old RHEL pricing for the duration of the SP. You can view your Amazon Web Services Savings Plans recommendations via the Amazon Cost Management console. SPs will apply as per the default behavior, which is to calculate your potential savings percentage for each combination of eligible usage and then apply to your highest savings percentage first and continue to apply until there is no more remaining usage or your commitment is exhausted. Learn more about how SPs apply here.
• Optimize instance mix for EC2 RHEL so as to use more smaller instance sizes. With the new pricing model, RHEL OS cost is proportional to the number of vCPUs. As the prices for smaller instances (<12 vCPUs) are going down, you can optimize your usage mix to use more smaller instances and reduce costs.
• We can provide RHEL volume discounts in exchange for an annual spend commitment. Please work with your Technical Account Manager to assess if you qualify.

If you have further questions, please reach out to Amazon Web Services Support or to your Account Manager.