Red Hat made its popular Enterprise Linux operating system available on demand by releasing it for the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service, as part of the company’s recent so called “automation” strategy.

Releasing the popular operating system for Amazon’s service that hosts business applications aims to deliver the interested ones a Linux and open-source infrastructure for simplifying how applications run, as well as the way how they should be managed.

However, what Red Hat made available for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service represents a private beta version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, as a public beta version was announced to be released before the end of 2007.

The base prices of the EC2 service are $19 per user, per month, and $0.94, $0.53 or $0.21 for every computer hour used on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, depending on the bandwidth, size and storage fees of the services purchased.

On Wednesday Red Hat also released a new operating system for delivering ISC (independent software vendor) applications on appliances. The company also made available Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which features improvements to its virtualization offering. The new OS extends its support to virtual guests running Windows XP, Server 2000, Server 2003 and Windows 2008 beta.