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Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers can now shift their licenses from on-premise gear up into Google's cloud as well as Amazon's. The new licensing option was announced by Google and Red Hat on Monday alongside the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Google's Amazon-killing "Cloud Platform". RHEL had been available in a "preview" mode since Compute Engine went into general availability in December 2013. With the news, RHEL will be available to customers in both an on-demand consumption model and via a "Red Hat Cloud Access" option which lets companies "migrate their current [RHEL] subscriptions for use on Google Cloud Platform." To give punters this option, Google has joined the "Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program", which means the company has met the "testing and certification requirements to demonstrate that they can deliver a safe, scalable, supported and consistent environment for enterprise cloud deployments," Red Hat wrote in a release. The RHEL software served up on Google's cloud platform differs from typical installations, Google explains, by incorporating Google's Compute Engine tools gcutil, gsutil, and gcimagebundle, enabling SELinux by default, allowing inbound SSH access through the RHEL firewall, augmenting rsyslog, and other tweaks. RHEL cloud servers cost extra. Google charges $0.06 per hour for the RHEL software on servers of less than eight virtual cores and $0.13 per hour on servers with more, along with the base server fee. Until today it was only possible for punters to shift their on-premise licenses up into cloud king Amazon Web Services. The new choice of suppliers is likely to be welcomed, especially since Amazon and Google are locked in a price war with each other. ® Source