IBM Corp. subsidiary Red Hat Inc. today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations on the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud.

The product is a virtual Linux workstation that can be accessed via Amazon’s NICE DCV remote visualization protocol, a standard web browser or a Windows or Mac thin client. Red Hat is positioning the service as suitable for processing-intensive workloads like animation rendering or data visualization but without the associated hardware costs.

The workstation-as-a-service offering supports a variety of graphics processing unit-accelerated hardware instances on AWS with optimization for high-performance, graphically intensive workloads. It’s compatible with Red Hat’s software development stack, which supports a wide range of languages, databases, and tools.

Customers can tap into the existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem, which the company said includes thousands of applications from independent software vendors that can be quickly deployed. The service is available across a variety of Amazon EC2 instances, including its G-series of instance types intended for machine learning inference and graphics-intensive applications.

The combination of GPU acceleration and high-performance infrastructure enables artists, medical professionals, scientists and engineers “to do their work anywhere in the world with the required features and in a low-latency environment,” said Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a statement. “Hybrid cloud adoption thrives on consistency and by making the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations experience the same, whether on-premises or via cloud service, Red Hat delivers that.”

Customers with Red Hat Cloud Access can use their existing subscription to RHEL for Workstations to deploy on AWS with no additional license required and while retaining all Red Hat support and subscription benefits.

Photo: Red Hat