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Microsoft Software Licensing via Amazon Shows Steep Price Disparity

By Michelle Amodio, TMCnet Contributor

Word on the Web is that those who will license Microsoft’s SQL Server on Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) will experience a price disparity compared to other platforms, and not in a good way. According to unnamed sources as cited by The Register, when compared to other options, Amazon is pricier than the competition. But why?

Late last year, Amazon took aim at competitors with its Aurora product, designed for high performance and reliability, with support for up to 6 million database inserts per minute, and 30 million selects per minute. As incentive to try, users of MySQL were able to move back and forth between Aurora and a MySQL database using Amazon’s migration tool. The price? 29 cents per hour.

According to The Register (News - Alert), “an 8-core r3.2xlarge AWS VM is $1.080 per hour with Windows or $2.775 per hour with Windows and SQL Server Standard, which means SQL Server costs $1.695 per hour,” which means Amazon Web Services clock in at almost double the price.

There’s actually no definitive answer as to why, so it’s left up to speculation at this point, but it certainly drums up interesting conversations in the software licensing industry.

What we do know is that in an effort to stay competitive with each other, both Microsoft (News - Alert) and Amazon offer license mobility to allow you to run instances of certain software in the cloud without buying additional licenses. Both companies draw out the process on their respective sites; Amazon lists the eligible applications with info on how to sign up, and Microsoft outlines the process of determining license mobility on Azure through Software Assurance.

Software licensing is a complicated issue. There are many challenges associated with this topic, and it is up to the IT professionals to address these challenges and be cognizant of their role in keeping businesses compliant.