Red Hat announced its cooperation with Internet giant Amazon two weeks ago; now users can take a first look at the new Web service. The partners are seeking to lease the less than intuitively named "Red hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (Amazon EC2)" as a software service. The "elastic computer cloud” name component is designed to emphasize the scalability and flexibility of the product. Depending on their needs businesses will be able to purchase computing power and just pay for the services they actually consume.

Anybody interested in taking part in the public beta test can register for a charge of US$ 19 per month on the company’s website. This is the basic charge for access which includes the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, along with Red Hat and Amazon infrastructure software and support. Other services can be ordered after registering and cost between 21 and 94 cents per hour depending on performance. On top of this there are charges per gigabyte of bandwidth or storage. Red Hat is looking to offer any application that is RHEL certified, and the full set of Jboss applications will be available. The service is currently only available from Amazon in the US, although Red Hat’s Werner Knoblich expects a similar offering to become available in Europe in the near future.

Market researchers with Gartner view the offer as a future-oriented trend and anticipate falling prices for software as a consequence.