AWS License Manager Cheat Sheet

• A service for centrally managing software licenses across AWS and on-premises environments.

• It gives you control and visibility into license usage, allowing you to limit licensing overages and reduce the risk of noncompliance and misreporting.

• Supports a variety of licensing models:

  • Perpetual – lifetime license with no expiration date.

  • Floating – shareable licenses.

  • Subscription – license with expiration date.

  • Usage-based – license with specific terms based on usage.

Concepts

• License configurations

  • Contains licensing rules based on enterprise agreements.

  • It consists of parameters and rules that change depending on the parameter values.

  • License rules determine how AWS handles commands that consume licenses.

  • Allows you to modify the number of licenses and usage limits.

  • You can use AWS RAM to share license configurations.

  • When a license configuration is deactivated, existing AMI or resources that use the license are unaffected, but license consumption is not tracked.

• License reports

  • By scheduling periodic snapshots of license usage, you can track the history of license configurations.

  • Usage reports are published directly to an S3 bucket.

    • License configuration report – number of licenses consumed and license configuration details. 

    • Resource report – tracked resources and license consumption.

• License type conversion

  • You can also convert a license type without redeploying existing workloads:

    • AWS provided licensing

    • Bring Your Own License model (BYOL)

  • Using AWS CLI, you can change the tenancy of your instance to:

    • Shared

    • Dedicated Instance

    • Dedicate Host

    • Host Resource Groups (Collection of Dedicated Hosts)

• With Systems Manager inventory, you can also discover on-premises applications and attach licensing rules.

• You can purchase a licenses from:

  • AWS Marketplace

  • AWS Data Exchange

  • Direct from a seller with managed entitlements

• License capabilities are captured as entitlements.

• You need cross-region replication of license metadata for:

  • Granted licenses

  • Seller-issued licenses.

• Each granted or seller-issued license and its associated information is automatically replicated to other Regions.

• The user-based subscriptions enable you to purchase Amazon provided licenses for Microsoft Visual Studio with a per user subscription fee.

• Only one member account per organization can be delegated as administrator.

• In the settings, you can enable the following options:

  • Distribution of managed entitlements and license configurations

  • Cross-account inventory discovery

• Dashboard

  • Displays the license consumption associated with each license configuration.

  • Shows alert results from license rule violations.

AWS License Manager Monitoring

• You can track licenses for the following resources:

  • Amazon EC2

    • Dedicated Instances

    • Dedicated Hosts

    • Spot Instances

    • Spot Fleet

  • AWS Systems Manager Managed Instances

  • Amazon RDS Oracle license

  • BYOL software from AWS Marketplace

• Use AWS CloudTrail to capture calls from the License Manager console and API operations.

AWS License Manager Security

• You can create licenses in AWS License Manager and distribute them through: 

  • End users using an IAM identity 

  • Digitally signed tokens generated by AWS License Manager

• To sign and verify licenses, use the AWS KMS Sign and Verify API operations.

• You can create an interface VPC endpoint to establish a private connection between VPC and AWS License Manager.

AWS License Manager Pricing

• You are charged for AWS resources that you create to run your application.

AWS License Manager Cheat Sheet References:

https://aws.amazon.com/license-manager/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/license-manager/latest/userguide/license-manager.html