Addressing compliance, cost when extending software licensing to cloud

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Moving applications to a public IaaS or PaaS cloud may simplify your hardware management, but it opens new issues around software licensing. Some of your contracts may not address cloud computing specifically because a vendor’s licensing model may predate cloud. While Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other cloud vendors offer cloud-specific software licenses, they introduce their own complications. Here are five things to keep in mind as you assess how your cloud migration plans can affect your software licensing.

1. What licensing model does your software vendor use? Sometimes it seems there are as many software licensing models as software vendors. Some vendors’ license models are based on the number of named users, while others prefer to charge based on the number of concurrent users. Other providers use the server processor or number of cores for determining fees…

User-based licensing may readily apply to running applications in a public cloud, assuming there are no other clauses in your contract that restrict use in the cloud. Processor- or core-based licensing can be more problematic because Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors sell instances using custom ratings for CPU power. AWS, for example, uses the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, Compute Unit, equivalent to a 1.0 GHz to 1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. Google Compute Engine specifies a number of virtual cores in each instance type using Google Compute Engine Unit (GCEU). The power of a single logical core on a Sandy Bridge (Intel Core) processor is 2.75 GCEUs. If you have CPU-based licenses, they may not easily map to cloud-provider CPU units…

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