It’s no secret that Linux has grown over the past decade to become a de facto standard for running reliable, highly-available, and mission-critical workloads...and not just in a corporate datacenter. Nine out of top 10 public clouds run on Linux and every major public cloud provider, from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure, offers multiple Linux distributions in their respective marketplaces.

Even with all of the flavors for Linux in the cloud, one common theme stands out: Red Hat Enterprise Linux leads when it comes to production workloads.

Based on a July 2017 study sponsored by Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the first choice for a commercial Linux on the public cloud and, more than that, the perceived market leader for current and new application deployments regardless of whether the workload is running in a datacenter or a cloud flavor.

The survey results call out that enterprises are choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the public cloud deployments because it’s:

Optimized for their current workloads

Certified across a broad ecosystem of enterprise use cases

Supports a robust library of thousands of certified enterprise applications

The blind survey, conducted by Management Insight Technologies, examined the preferences for and characteristics of a Linux operating system in the public cloud. More than 500 IT decision makers engaged in public cloud deployments across the globe responded, and their feedback helps to paint a clearer picture of how organizations are using Linux in the cloud and where enterprise Linux truly stands. Other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux serving as the leading enterprise Linux platform in the public cloud among respondents, the survey also showcased other interesting factors:

More than 50 percent of respondents also run their applications in the public cloud on Linux-based virtual machines.

Reliability, security, ease of deployment, and maintainability were key capabilities for Linux deployments on public clouds

65 percent of Linux deployments in the public cloud by enterprises are paid and commercially-supported

"The cloud" certainly isn’t just a developer testbed anymore and where enterprise workloads go, so to does commercially-supported Linux, particularly the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are committed to supporting the transformation of enterprise IT across all footprints, including public cloud, and all of the innovations that entails.

To read the full survey results, please visit www.redhat.com/en/resources/state-of-linux-in-public-cloud-for-enterprises.