Open source company Red Hat has made its Enterprise Linux OS available on demand and is releasing it for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.

According to a company press release, the move is part of Red Hat's "automation" strategy. This is supposed to simplify how applications run and are managed. Currently, a private beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 is now available, with a public beta slated to be made available before the end of the year.

It will cost US$19 per month per user and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 for every computer hour used on the EC2 service.  And those hours do add up quickly.

More here.