Windows and Red Hat pricing on Amazon EC2 vs. on-premise
Open source vs. proprietary pricing differential narrows on the cloud
Follow @SavioRodriguesAfter my previous post, "Cloud to boost proprietary software use?," Tim Bray questioned whether the pricing comparison of "WebSphere/SUSE vs. JBoss/RHEL on EC2 was a transient anomaly." JBoss' Rich Sharples commented that I was comparing apples and oranges. That was not my intention. I simply picked the only two application server Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that I could easily find pricing for. And in retrospect, my intention was not to compare proprietary versus open source pricing in the cloud, but rather to compare the price differential of proprietary versus open source products in the cloud versus on-premise.
Let me try again with Windows versus Linux. Specifically, I looked at the price of Windows Server 2008 R2 versus Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on-premise and on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I wanted to evaluate how, if at all, the Windows price premium differs on-premise versus in the Amazon cloud. One can argue that "you need 2 Windows servers to do the work of a RHEL server." Such an argument has no impact on this analysis. If you do in fact need two or more Windows servers per RHEL server, this ratio would hold equally well on-premise or on Amazon EC2.
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Here's what I found:
On-premise license:
- Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Edition: $2,999
- Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with 25 Client Access Licenses: $3,999
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Premium Subscription for 1 year: $1,299
- Windows price premium: 130 to 208 percent [see update below]
Amazon EC2 license on Standard-Small AMI:
