Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), now allows users of its Elastic Compute Cloud service (EC2) to rent dedicated physical servers. This is useful for saving money on software licensing as well as meeting regulatory and compliance requirements.
EC2 Dedicated hosts, which were previously shown on AWS Insider, allow customers to control the mapping of EC2 instances and specific physical servers. This is in contrast to the traditional model of renting shared physical servers or securing dedicated virtual machines. AWS spokesperson Jeff Barr wrote last week that the new model offers several benefits.
Barr stated that you can transfer your server-based licenses for Windows Server or SQL Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and other enterprise systems and products to cloud. “Dedicated Hosts give you visibility into the available sockets and physical cores so you can obtain and use software licences that are a good match with the hardware.”
Barr stated that organizations can also ensure compliance with privacy rules and other regulatory requirements by indicating that their apps are run on servers specifically designed for their use.
Barr explained that the new control allows for fine-grained placement of EC2 instances on specific hosts. Barr also mentioned that EC2 can place instances on a specific Amazon EC2 Dedicated host or that EC2 can automatically place instances onto your Amazon EC2 Dedicated hosts. Amazon EC2 Dedicated hosts also support affinity, which allows instances of Amazon EC2 Dedicated host to be placed on the same host regardless of whether they have been stopped or restarted.
Barr stated that users can use AWS Config, which tracks the history of such actions on each dedicated server, to stop and restart instances. He said that this data can be used to verify usage against licensing metrics.
AWS has provided the following table that outlines the differences between dedicated hosts and instances:
Characteristic Dedicated Instances Dedicated Hosting Allows for the use of dedicated physical servers
X X Per Instance billing (subject a $2 per area fee)
X per Host billing
X Visibility of sockets and cores, host-ID
X Affinity between a instance and a host
Placement of X Targeted Instance
Placement of an automatic instance
X X Add capacity by using an allocation request
Here are the details for X pricing
