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SAP-C02 Practice Question 40: BYOL License Compliance

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) · Test 4 · question 10 of 10

Migration and Modernizationeasy

A manufacturer is migrating Windows Server and SQL Server workloads to AWS under a bring-your-own- license agreement. The licences are counted per physical core and the vendor's terms require the software to run on dedicated physical hardware. Thirty teams, each with their own AWS account in the company's organization, will launch these instances themselves.

A vendor audit last year produced a six-figure true-up penalty because nobody could say how many cores were actually running the licensed software. The company wants to keep using the licences it already owns, wants a running count of consumption against the entitlement it holds, and wants launches that would exceed the entitlement to be blocked rather than reported after the fact.

Which approach should the solutions architect recommend?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • C. Define a self-managed license configuration in AWS License Manager with a hard limit based on physical cores, associate it with the approved Windows and SQL Server AMIs, and have teams launch onto Dedicated Hosts through a host resource group

AWS License Manager exists for this problem. It supports tracking software licensed by physical cores, sockets, vCPUs, or number of machines, and it lets administrators set rule-based controls with hard or soft limits on consumption. A hard limit is the part that matters here: License Manager helps stop non-compliant server usage before it happens, so a launch that would exceed the entitlement is blocked rather than discovered in an audit. Associating the configuration with the approved AMIs means the rules apply wherever the teams launch from, License Manager integrates with AWS Organizations so consumption is tracked centrally across all 30 accounts, and its integration with Amazon EC2 covers Dedicated Hosts, which is how the vendor's dedicated-hardware requirement is satisfied.

Option A depends on every team applying a tag correctly and is purely retrospective. Cost Explorer reports spend, not licensed core counts, and it cannot prevent a single launch.

Option B produces a better inventory than tags but is still detective and still manual. A quarterly spreadsheet reconciliation is exactly the process that failed the audit, and it blocks nothing.

Option D would remove the tracking problem by abandoning the licences the company already paid for, raising the hourly rate on every instance. It also does not satisfy a BYOL agreement the company wants to keep using, and license-included offerings do not exist for every edition in question.

Reference: What is AWS License Manager?

Practice Test 4 ›

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