Red Hat announced on October 19, 2026 that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now a first-party offering on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Until now, OCI customers who wanted RHEL had to bring an existing subscription through Red Hat’s Bring Your Own Subscription (BYOS) program. That option stays, but you can now pick a RHEL platform image straight from the OCI Console, CLI or API and pay for it through Oracle.
What changes for OCI users
- Images: RHEL 9 and RHEL 10 images for Intel and AMD fully virtualized instances, with Oracle-specific performance profiles and flexible compute shapes.
- Billing: RHEL usage can be paid with Oracle Universal Credits (100% drawdown), metered pay-as-you-go per Oracle CPU-hour. Oracle notes these charges come on top of normal OCI infrastructure charges.
- Updates: Running instances pull packages and updates from OCI-hosted Red Hat Update Infrastructure (RHUI).
- Support: Front-line support comes through Oracle Support, with Red Hat behind it for escalation.
- Telemetry: RHEL instances hook into OCI’s built-in monitoring, CLI, API and console.
More of the Red Hat portfolio on Oracle Marketplace
Alongside the first-party RHEL images, subscriptions for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, RHEL, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization can now be bought through Oracle Marketplace, so customers can transact through Oracle and count the spend against existing cloud commitments.
Why it matters
For admins already standardized on RHEL on-premises, this removes the separate subscription paperwork when moving workloads to OCI and keeps the same OS image across both environments, which cuts down on configuration drift. It’s also notable given that Oracle ships its own RHEL-compatible distribution, Oracle Linux: OCI customers now get genuine RHEL as a native, Oracle-billed choice right next to it. Red Hat is pitching the move at compute-heavy workloads, including machine learning and AI, and says distributed cloud deployments will follow later.
Sources: Red Hat press release (Business Wire), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure blog