Amazon Web Services licensing covers two different things. The first is how Amazon Web Services (AWS) sells its own cloud services: pay-as-you-go use of the Services under the AWS Customer Agreement and the service-specific AWS Service Terms, billed monthly.[2][1] The second, and the one that matters most for software asset management, is how other vendors’ software is licensed when it runs on AWS: either bundled into the price of an AWS resource (“license included”), brought by the customer under its own agreement with the vendor (“bring your own license”, BYOL), or bought from a third party through AWS Marketplace.[4][11] AWS publishes counting tools and tenancy options for BYOL, but the license terms themselves remain the vendor’s; for example, AWS’s own License Manager documentation states that “AWS does not participate in the audit process with software vendors.”[7] For the general pattern of metered licensing, see Subscription and consumption licensing.
Editions
AWS does not sell software editions in the way that a desktop or database vendor does. The commercially relevant constructs are purchase options and tenancy models, each of which changes how third-party licenses may be counted:
| Construct | What it is | Licensing relevance |
|---|---|---|
| Default (shared) tenancy EC2 | Instances on physical servers that may host instances from different customers | Only licenses whose terms allow shared cloud use (for Microsoft, License Mobility through Software Assurance) can be brought.[4] |
| Dedicated Instances | Instances on hardware dedicated to a single customer account, billed per instance | Partial BYOL support; no visibility of sockets or cores.[5] |
| Dedicated Hosts | A physical server fully dedicated to the customer, billed per host | Exposes sockets and physical cores and supports host affinity, so per-socket and per-core licenses can be counted.[5] |
| License-included AMIs and RDS engines | AWS-provided images and database engines whose price includes the software license | Windows Server and SQL Server on EC2 and RDS; RDS for Oracle Standard Edition 2 only.[4][16] |
| Amazon WorkSpaces | Managed virtual desktops, AlwaysOn (monthly) or AutoStop (hourly) | Windows desktop BYOL requires dedicated hardware and a regional minimum.[13][14] |
| AWS Marketplace | Catalog of third-party software, data and services billed on the AWS bill | Seller sets price and EULA; public or private offers.[11] |
The deeper articles on this wiki treat each construct separately: license-included and BYOL for Microsoft workloads, Dedicated Hosts and AWS License Manager, Savings Plans and Reserved Instances and AWS Marketplace private offers and pricing.
Metrics
AWS itself meters infrastructure, but it also names the units in which it counts third-party licenses. AWS License Manager supports four license types (vCPUs, Cores, Sockets and Instances), recorded in the catalog as vCPU, Cores, Sockets and Instances.[6] A vCPU is one hardware thread: “Each thread is represented as a virtual CPU (vCPU) on the instance.”[17] Other units that appear in AWS licensing documents are the Dedicated Host (per-host billing), the Instance-hour, the Savings Plans hourly commitment measured in USD per hour, the per-user fee of License Manager user-based subscriptions, and the WorkSpace billed monthly or hourly.[5][10][18][13] Which of these a given third-party license must be counted in is decided by that vendor’s terms, not by AWS; see Processor and core licensing and Named user licensing for the general families.
Counting / floors
Several AWS rules change the license count directly:
- Optimize CPUs. For instances launched from license-included Windows and SQL Server AMIs, customers can reduce cores or disable multithreading and pay licensing fees on the vCPUs configured; other instances are charged as if default CPU options were used.[17] See the rule Optimize CPUs.
- Stopped instances. License Manager releases a stopped instance’s license back to the pool by default; the Include stopped instances rule keeps counting it, for licenses that stay allocated regardless of running state.[7]
- Host affinity. License Manager can pin a license to a Dedicated Host for 1 to 180 days, and only for Cores or Sockets counting.[6]
- User-based subscriptions. For Microsoft Office and Visual Studio bought from AWS, “a user is only counted once” regardless of the number of instances the user connects to, while Windows Server is charged per vCPU with the instance.[19]
- WorkSpaces BYOL floor. Bringing Windows desktop licenses to WorkSpaces requires “a minimum of 50 WorkSpaces per Region per month” for non-GPU bundles.[14]
Virtualization & partitioning
On AWS the partitioning question is a tenancy question. Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts both run on hardware dedicated to one customer, and AWS states that “There are no performance, security, or physical differences between Dedicated Instances and instances on Dedicated Hosts.”[5] The difference is visibility and control: Dedicated Hosts report sockets and physical cores, support instance affinity and targeted placement, and are billed per host; Dedicated Instances give no visibility of the host and are billed per instance.[5] The rule Dedicated Hosts expose sockets and physical cores records the comparison. For the vendor-side view of hard and soft partitioning, see Virtualization and partitioning.
Cloud / BYOL
For Microsoft software, AWS Service Terms Section 5.7 defines a BYOL Program: unless the Microsoft agreement says otherwise, the customer must use Dedicated Instances or Dedicated Hosts and launch from VMs built from its own software binaries, and is “solely responsible for obtaining all required licenses and for complying with all applicable Microsoft licensing requirements”.[1] The separate Microsoft License Mobility benefit allows eligible server applications with active Software Assurance on default tenancy, but Windows Server is not eligible.[4] Licenses without License Mobility must be perpetual and purchased before 1 October 2019.[4] These rules are covered in AWS license-included and BYOL for Microsoft workloads.
For databases on Amazon RDS, SQL Server can be license-included or brought as media (BYOM) under License Mobility, and Oracle Database can be license-included only for Standard Edition 2, with BYOL for Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition 2.[15][16] RDS for Oracle BYOL customers must hold the Oracle license “with Software Update License and Support” for their instance class and edition and follow Oracle’s cloud policy.[16] Oracle’s own counting rules for authorized clouds are covered in Cloud BYOL.
Linux subscriptions also have tenancy rules: RHEL and SUSE Linux on Dedicated Hosts require the customer’s own AMIs, except on high-memory hosts.[5] Spot Instances may not be used with “IBM software packages or Microsoft SQL Server”.[1]
Programs
The catalog records the following AWS commercial constructs as programs:
| Program | Kind | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| License Included | Pay-as-you-go | Windows Server and SQL Server licenses bundled with EC2 and RDS; no CALs.[4] |
| BYOL Program | Cloud policy | Service Terms 5.7 conditions for Microsoft BYOL.[1] |
| License Mobility on AWS | Cloud policy | Microsoft SA benefit for eligible server applications on shared tenancy.[4] |
| Savings Plans | Commitment | USD-per-hour commitment for one or three years; up to 72% off On-Demand.[9] |
| Reserved Instances | Commitment | Billing discount tied to instance attributes.[10] |
| Dedicated Host Reservations | Commitment | Discounted host capacity by instance family and Availability Zone; up to 70% off On-Demand.[5] |
| AWS Marketplace private offers | Cloud commercial model | Negotiated third-party pricing and EULA.[12] |
| WorkSpaces BYOL Program | Cloud policy | Service Terms 26.8 conditions for Windows desktop BYOL.[1] |
| License Manager user-based subscriptions | Subscription plan | Per-user Office and Visual Studio from AWS.[18] |
Commitments are noncancellable: Section 5.4.2 of the Service Terms says Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and Dedicated Host Reservations are charged “for the duration of the term you selected, even if you terminate the Agreement.”[1]
Contract terms and audits
Third-party software used with AWS is “Third-Party Content”, governed by the Customer Agreement and by any separate terms accompanying it, “which terms and conditions may include separate fees and charges.”[2] AWS’s own software (AWS Content) is licensed under the AWS Intellectual Property License on a limited, revocable, non-sublicensable and non-transferable basis, solely for permitted use of the Services.[3] License-included Microsoft Software “is neither sold nor distributed to you”, may be used only with the Services, and Microsoft is an intended third-party beneficiary of those terms.[1]
The AWS Customer Agreement contains no clause on audits of third-party software licenses. AWS instead positions License Manager as a record-keeping tool: it “provides built-in dashboards that can be used when considering new license purchases, reporting to procurement, and in vendor audits”, while customers remain responsible for capturing their agreements as rules.[19][7] License Manager tracks software licensed by “virtual cores (vCPUs), physical cores, sockets, or number of machines”, and AWS Config can record Dedicated Host changes as a data source for license reports.[8][4] Audit rights therefore come from the software vendor’s contract; see Software license audit.
Out of scope
This article does not cover AWS infrastructure price lists by instance type and Region, AWS Support plans, private pricing agreements negotiated directly with AWS (which AWS does not publish), the terms of individual AWS Marketplace sellers, or AWS GovCloud (US) and China Regions. It does not restate Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Red Hat or SUSE license terms; those are covered on the vendors’ own pages in this wiki.