Oracle licenses on AWS (illustrated)

Greg
1 min readMar 19, 2022

Licenses topic can be quite complex. That’s why I have decided to write this very short story to give you an overview of the main Oracle licensing options on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Visual overview

Illustration of the main different licensing options available on AWS

AWS is considered as an “Authorized Cloud Environment” by Oracle.

License included

You can use Amazon RDS for Oracle, this way AWS manages the licensing
for you (you don’t have to think about it, you can contact the AWS support for both Amazon RDS and Oracle Database specific service requests).

Bring You Own License (“BYOL”)

You can import your existing Oracle licenses to AWS.
It is worth noting here that the options you can use depend on your license specifications.

  • RDS for Oracle (this way you can benefit from Amazon RDS features)
    Also worth noting that for “multi-az” feature you will need more licenses
  • Amazon EC2 with dedicated host, dedicated instance or shared tenancy depending on your license.

The end

This story was very short and showed the basics of Oracle licensing options on AWS. There are other options available (Amazon EC2 bare metal,VMware Cloud on AWS, …).

References

Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment
https://www.oracle.com/assets/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf

Oracle FAQ on AWS
https://aws.amazon.com/oracle/faq/

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