If there’s one thing that the past several years of IT evolution have taught us, it’s that choice is king. This starts with enterprises not wanting to be locked into a closed, single vendor technology stack. Choice now not only includes the option of footprint - from bare-metal servers to public cloud instances - but also the underlying architecture powering a technology stack. For many organizations, this means considering Arm processors as part of their computing mix, a consideration that was highlighted last night with the launch of Amazon’s EC2 A1 instances.

In support of Red Hat’s continued commitment to customer choice across multiple computing architectures, we’re pleased to say that Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM AMIs are available immediately on Amazon EC2 A1 instances. This means that customers seeking to use a multi-architecture approach across the hybrid cloud can use the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to fuel their mission-critical workloads, even on Arm instances in AWS Cloud.

For nearly a decade, we have worked to deliver our portfolio of open technologies across a wide variety of architectures, enabling our customers to select not only the open software that best meets their needs but also the underlying computing foundation. The availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM as an AMI for Amazon EC2 A1 instances represents a major milestone, backed by seven years of hard work in community and standards development around Arm computing, and one that we are pleased to have reached.

At its core, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM is still Red Hat Enterprise Linux, providing consistency across all footprints of the hybrid cloud. It can be managed via Red Hat Satellite, automated via Red Hat Ansible Automation and provides a familiar set of tools, commands and options that Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers have come to expect and rely on for their production environments.

Beyond the consistency provided by the platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM gives developers a stable set of runtimes and tools to port and build applications for the Arm architecture. This includes both Red Hat Software Collections and Red Hat Developer Toolset, which deliver the latest, stable, fully-open dynamic languages, databases, compilers and other tools for creating production applications in a supported environment.

Initially, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (7.6) will be available for Amazon EC2 A1 instances. In the near future organizations considering Arm architecture on the public cloud will also be able to test Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for ARM Beta. This avoids the need to procure dedicated hardware for testing the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux while still being able to explore the new world of Arm instances on AWS Cloud.

Scott Herold is senior manager for the Multiple Architecture Group at Red Hat. Jon Masters is chief Arm architect at Red Hat.