Now Available: Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, and the ability to use existing server-bound licenses

You can now provision Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, physical servers with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses, including Windows Server, SQL Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (subject to your license terms), and can also help you meet compliance requirements.

A Dedicated Host allows you to reliably launch EC2 instances on the same physical server over time. You have visibility over how your Dedicated Hosts are utilized and you can see how many sockets and cores are installed on the server. You can also turn on Dedicated Host recording in AWS Config and use AWS Config as a data source for license reporting. These features allow you to minimize licensing costs in a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) scenario and help you address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements.

Dedicated Hosts are available for M3, M4, C3, C4, I2, D2, G2, and R3 instance families in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions where these instance families are currently supported. For more information on Dedicated Host availability and pricing, visit the Dedicated Hosts pricing page.

To get started, visit the Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts Getting Started page. To learn more about how to bring your own licenses of Windows software and use them in EC2, visit the Windows Bring Your Own License (BYOL) FAQ.