CIS RHEL7 Hardened Benchmark AMI cost

Just to comment on what was said in the video about the CIS Red Hat 7 Linux Benchmark Image on the Marketplace.

Although Ryan stated the image cost was $0.02/hr, this is in addition to the cost of a Red Hat Linux 7 AMI

So for e.g. a T2.small in eu-west-2 (London):

An Amazon Linux 2 instance will cost $0.026/hr

A RHEL7 instance will cost $0.086/hr

A CIS hardened RHEL7 instance will cost $0.086/hr + $0.02/hr i.e. $0.106/hr

So the cost can be signifiantly more.

Dont get me wrong, I’m a big fan of CIS, I highly recommend using their recommendations, whether you roll your own or buy the AMI.

But be aware of the cost before you commit to your chosen AMI.

As an aside, the cost differential does becomes less the bigger the EC2 instance, so may be a good choice for a production system.

(BTW I’m not aware of a CIS-Hardened Amazon Linux image in case you are wondering.)