AWS License Manager Cheat Sheet

AWS License Manager is a service that simplifies the management of your software licenses from various vendors (such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM) across AWS and your on-premises environments. It provides control and visibility into your license usage, helping you to prevent overages, reduce the risk of non-compliance, and lower costs.

Core Functionality

• Centralized Management: Track and manage all your software licenses in a single, central dashboard.

• Enforce Licensing Rules: Create custom rules based on your licensing agreements to control license consumption and prevent violations before they happen.

• Automated Discovery: Automatically discover and track software usage across your EC2 instances and on-premises servers (via the AWS Systems Manager Agent).

• Bring Your Own License (BYOL): Simplifies the process of tracking your existing licenses for use with AWS services like EC2 Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Instances.

Key Concepts

License Configurations

• A license configuration is a set of rules you create in License Manager to govern the use of your software.

• These rules are based on the terms of your enterprise agreements (e.g., licensing by vCPUs, cores, sockets, or number of instances).

• When you associate a license configuration with an AMI, License Manager ensures that any EC2 instance launched from that AMI adheres to the defined rules.

• License configurations can be shared across multiple AWS accounts using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM).

Automated Discovery

• License Manager integrates with AWS Systems Manager Inventory to scan your managed instances (both in AWS and on-premises) for installed software.

• This feature helps you discover applications that need to be licensed and ensures you have a complete picture of your software inventory.

Dashboard and Reporting

• The central dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of your license configurations, license consumption, and any alerts for rule violations.

• You can schedule license reports to get periodic snapshots of your license usage. These reports are delivered to a specified S3 bucket and provide a history for tracking and auditing purposes.

Supported Licensing Models

License Manager supports a variety of common licensing models, including:

• Perpetual: Lifetime licenses with no expiration date.

• Floating: Shareable licenses that can be used by multiple users or servers.

• Subscription: Licenses with a specific expiration date.

• Usage-based: Licenses with terms based on consumption.

User-Based Subscriptions

• This feature allows you to manage licenses that are assigned to individual users.

• You can purchase user-based subscriptions for software like Microsoft Visual Studio and remote desktop clients directly through the AWS Marketplace and track their usage in License Manager.

Integration and Security

• AWS Organizations: You can delegate a single member account as the administrator for License Manager, allowing you to manage licenses for your entire organization from a central account.

• AWS CloudTrail: All API calls made to License Manager are captured in CloudTrail, providing a complete audit trail of all actions.

• VPC Endpoints: You can create an interface VPC endpoint to establish a private, secure connection between your VPC and AWS License Manager, without requiring traffic to go over the public internet.

• Resource Tracking: License Manager can track licenses for a wide range of resources, including:

  • Amazon EC2 Instances (On-Demand, Spot, Dedicated Hosts, Dedicated Instances)

  • AWS Systems Manager Managed Instances (on-premises servers)

  • Amazon RDS for Oracle (for BYOL scenarios)

Pricing

• AWS License Manager is offered at no additional charge.

• You only pay for the AWS resources (e.g., EC2 instances, RDS databases) that you run.