Managing licenses in the cloud can become a headache for both asset managers and auditors. AWS License Manager has been designed to make the management and control of licenses with third party vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM when they are used both in the cloud and on-premises. It supports and tracks any software where the licensing agreement is set against virtual cores, VCPUs, physical cores, sockets, or a number of machines. AWS License Manager enables you to create license configurations which are made of multiple customizable rules that can be centered around the stipulations made by your different licensing agreements. These different rule types can include license counting type and this defines how your licenses are counted, by vCPU or physical core. Minimum and maximum allowed number of vCPUS or physical cores. This is dependent on the previous rule and the counting type but it essentially sets a threshold value for vCPUs or physical cores. License count, this specifies the number of licenses used within the license configuration. License count hard limit, when I hard limit is set it will block the launch of an instance that would make a breach of license amount. If you set a soft limit it will allow the launch of the instance however it will send a notification alert of the issue. Allowed tenancy, here you can specify which EC2 tenancy can consume a license with the configuration such as shared tenancy, which is the default, dedicated instance or dedicated host. 

These rules are evaluated against your EC2 computer resources based on the software running on them to assess if your environment has reached its licensing limits on your EC2 instances. AWS License Manager is currently supported and integrated with EC2 instances, dedicated instances, dedicated hosts, spot instances, spot fleets, and also auto-scaling groups. The customized rules help to minimize licensing breaches and depending on the configuration the EC2 instance can be prevented from being launched if there is a breach or it can send notifications to the appropriate team informing them of the limitations. AWS License Manager is integrated with AWS Systems Manager and AWS Organizations, allowing you to monitor your license requirements across multiple AWS accounts, plus on-premise environments. This allows you to monitor your licenses for your software vendors via a single account in the dashboard view. In addition to this, if you purchase resources from AWS Marketplace then you can also integrate Bring Your Own License to AWS License Manager as well. 

So in essence, AWS License Manager provides a means of addressing, tracking, monitoring and managing licenses in a centralized location for on-premises and multi account AWS environments across multiple third party vendors using customized rules. 

That brings me to the end of this lecture. Next I will be looking at Amazon Elastic Inference.