Red Hat Enterprise Linux Pricing update

As announced, Red Hat is updating its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) royalty model to a scalable model to achieve better consistency with the most common model for cloud virtual machines. These changes are expected to affect all Red Hat resellers across the market. 

In response to Red Hat’s price changes, Azure will also be rolling out price changes for all Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances. These changes will start occurring on April 1, 2024, with price decreases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and RHEL for SAP Business Applications licenses for vCPU sizes less than 12. All other price updates will be effective July 1, 2024. 

These price adjustments will apply across all Commercial and Gov areas. 

How this will affect you

These price changes will mostly lead to a price decrease for workloads with 12vCPUs or less, while all other workloads will experience a price increase. The cost will probably decrease if you mainly use smaller vCPU instances (<12 vCPUs), and the cost will probably increase if most of your usage is for vCPU instances larger than 12 vCPUs. 

The price updates will have an impact on all Red Hat products offered by Azure such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), RHEL with HA, RHEL for SAP Business Applications, RHEL for SAP with HA and Update Services and SQL Server Enterprise Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

To calculate the impact on the bill due to this change, see estimates based on the table below: 

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to Azure Support or your Microsoft account team. Additional Azure cost optimization resources can be found here.