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AWS License Manager

AWS License Manager tracks software licences from vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM across multiple AWS accounts and Regions, and across servers that are not on AWS at all. The point is compliance evidence and overage prevention: knowing how many licences are in use before a vendor audit tells you.

  • It supports any software licensed on virtual cores (vCPUs), physical cores, sockets, or number of machines.
  • It gives consolidated visibility across an AWS organization, so licence consumption is counted once for the whole estate rather than per account.
  • Rule-based controls set hard or soft limits on new and existing deployments. A hard limit stops a non-compliant launch happening; a soft limit allows it and records the breach.
  • Built-in dashboards report consumption over time, which is what a vendor audit actually asks for.

Where the rules bite

Section titled “Where the rules bite”

License Manager is integrated with Amazon EC2, so licensing rules are enforced through the resource lifecycle for EC2 instances, Dedicated Instances, Dedicated Hosts, Spot Instances and Spot Fleet. Used with AWS Systems Manager, it also discovers and tracks applications running on physical or virtual servers outside AWS. With AWS Organizations, one account administers licences for every account in the organization.

It also integrates with Amazon RDS for Oracle and RDS for Db2 vCPU-based BYOL licences, giving visibility into vCPU consumption for those engines.

Bring your own licence

Section titled “Bring your own licence”

The main reason teams reach for License Manager is BYOL: re-using an existing licence entitlement on AWS infrastructure rather than paying the licence-included hourly rate. License type conversions change a workload between AWS-provided licensing and BYOL without redeploying it.

Related capabilities worth knowing exist:

  • License asset groups — central management and tracking of licences across accounts and Regions within an organization.
  • Granted licences — governing licences bought through AWS Marketplace or AWS Data Exchange.
  • Seller-issued licences — for independent software vendors distributing and tracking their own licences.
  • User-based subscriptions — per-user subscriptions for supported products, fully licensed by AWS.
  • Linux subscriptions — visibility into the commercial Linux subscriptions you run on AWS.

Shareable through AWS Resource Access Manager: a licence configuration created once can be shared across accounts rather than recreated in each.