SAP Licensing on AWS: BYOL Considerations

Quick Answer

Bringing existing SAP software licenses to AWS to reduce costs is fundamentally a licensing-visibility problem: many SAP license structures are tied to the number of physical cores or sockets a system runs on, so the AWS pricing model chosen has to expose that underlying physical hardware detail rather than abstracting it away. Dedicated Hosts do exactly that - they give you visibility into and control over the specific physical server, including its cores and sockets, which lets you track and apply your existing per-core or per-socket SAP licenses the same way you would on-premises, rather than losing that mapping in a virtualized, shared-hardware environment. This is the key distinction from the other pricing and purchasing options: Compute Savings Plans and Reserved Instances both offer cost discounts in exchange for usage or capacity commitments, but neither exposes the physical hardware in a way that supports bring-your-own-license tracking, since they're purely commercial and billing constructs layered on top of standard EC2 capacity. Dedicated Instances are closer conceptually, since they provide hardware isolation for a single customer, but they still don't expose the physical server's core and socket details the way Dedicated Hosts do, which is specifically what license tracking for per-core or per-socket SAP licensing requires. Whenever a scenario mentions bringing existing licenses that are tied to physical cores or sockets, Dedicated Hosts is the AWS pricing model built to support that requirement, as opposed to any pricing model focused purely on cost savings without hardware visibility.