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Can someone explain the difference between the RHEL and GA releases available on AWS? RHEL costs are about double those of the GA release and I'm wondering what that extra cost includes.

HopelessN00b
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BillMan
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it should be asked of the AWS provider. – Jenny D Jun 24 '14 at 12:16
  • @JennyD Not... well, they probably wouldn't provide much of an answer. [Amazon's set up an AWS marketplace](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/), where you can rent the use of cloud VMs running a wide variety of operating systems and/or other systems. (MongoDB AWS instance, anyone?) So it's not as clear-cut as being a service Amazon provides and would presumably know about, but has elements of Amazon just being the marketplace where other vendors are selling their wares. – HopelessN00b Jun 24 '14 at 12:21
  • @HopelessN00b I said "the AWS provider", not Amazon. Whoever is selling the service should be able to explain it. – Jenny D Jun 24 '14 at 12:31
  • @JennyD So you did... my bad... I clearly need more caffeine this AM. – HopelessN00b Jun 24 '14 at 12:35
  • Which AMIs are you comparing exactly? Are they from the same vendor? Are they Community or Marketplace? If you are using community AMIs, price should be the one in the EC2 pricing web. In Marketplace, prices will vary depending on the RHEL release (although I have not been able to find a "GA" release in the Marketplace, only RHEL4, 5, 6 and 7, with PV and HVM variants). – ma.tome Jun 25 '14 at 00:15
  • @ma.tome Check out RHEL-6.5_GA-x86_64-7-Hourly2 - ami-8d756fe4 in the community APIs Provided by Red Hat, Inc. – BillMan Jun 25 '14 at 13:24

2 Answers2

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RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and is licensed (not-free) software, so the extra cost pays for the price of the software.

The GA releases are CentOS, which is free.

CentOS is basically a free version of RedHat, or at least as close as is feisable - the differences are generally pretty negligible, except when it comes to support and use of RedHat's proprietary systems, which, obviously CentOS doesn't have access to.

HopelessN00b
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  • Thanks @HopelessNoob. That makes it a little more confusing for me, because there is a different version of Centos distributed by centos.org. The GA release is distributed by Redhat. – BillMan Jun 24 '14 at 12:31
  • @Billman provide links - if they're both RedHat-supplied, G.A. probably stands for General Availability, which would presumabaly be RedHAt without access to support or RedHat services... but again, until you provide links to what, specifically you're referencing, it'll be hard to say for sure. – HopelessN00b Jun 24 '14 at 12:34
  • Centos is available here (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00IOYDTV6?ref=cns_srchrow). The redhat version doesn't have a web page, but the AMI is ami-8d756fe4 – BillMan Jun 24 '14 at 12:45
  • @BillMan Yeah, looks like something you'd need to ask the vendor... I can't find any useful details based on that. – HopelessN00b Jun 24 '14 at 12:50
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For what its worth, one of the differences I found between Centos 6.5 and Redhat GA 6.5 is that the Redhat GA release has cloud-init built into it whereas Centos does not.

BillMan
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