Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become Red Hat's very first Premier Cloud Provider Partner.

Fair enough. Red Hat was the first supported operating system and JBoss the first supported middleware on AWS.

Anyway, Red Hat has thought up this shiny new program to certify "industry leaders in cloud computing" on Red Hat solutions.

Premier Cloud Provider Partners are supposed to collaborate with Red Hat on technical support, security updates, hardware certification, sales and marketing, and business models.

Red Hat says customer interest in cloud computing, both in building virtualized internal infrastructure systems and extending their applications to the cloud, is increasing and that they're asking to transfer and use Red Hat subscriptions on premise and/or in cloud environments.

They also want to rent elastic computing by-the-hour with access to consistent, technical support, security updates, and compatibility with existing IT resources.

This program is supposed to provide them the flexibility when developing and deploying their applications.

Red Hat says that as part of the program, it will work with customers to identify secure, optimized, and supported cloud providers, and will work with ISVs to help enable delivery of cloud offerings with an on-ramp program that spans technology, business and support models.