A migration to Cloud presents a massive opportunity for organizations to optimize the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their IT estate. However, licensing — particularly for Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server — can often become an unexpected cost burden.

Cloudamize has helped thousands of companies navigate this complexity, and now, a recent AWS development offers a significant new avenue for savings.

The License Challenge in the Cloud

In the cloud, you typically have two options for software licensing:

  • Bring Your Own License (BYOL): Utilizing existing licenses, often offering flexibility.
  • License-Included Instances: Purchasing OS and software licenses directly as part of your cloud virtual machine. This is often the simplest option but has lacked flexibility

For years, AWS has allowed customers using BYOL SQL Server licenses to reduce the number of available cores on a machine, thereby directly reducing the licensing cost. And, for years, Cloudamize has been able to accurately recommend the optimum number of cores in these cases.

A Game-Changing Update from AWS

In late 2025, AWS announced a pivotal update: the ability to reduce cores (and therefore, license costs) now applies to both Windows Server and SQL Server licenses-included instances. This drastically expands the opportunity for cost reduction across a much wider range of cloud deployments, as Customers no longer have to bring their own licenses to take advantage of the cost savings associated with reducing cores. (See the official AWS announcement)

Why Core Reduction is Essential for Optimization

The underlying issue is that cloud instance sizing often requires a mismatch between resources:

  • A workload’s network, RAM, and I/O requirements might demand a large instance size (e.g., an r7i.4xlarge).
  • This large instance comes with a fixed number of CPU cores (e.g., 16 cores) to meet the non-CPU requirements.
  • However, the actual workload processing might only need a fraction of those available cores (e.g., 10 cores).

Since Windows and SQL Server licenses are tied to the number of virtual cores, you end up paying for licenses on cores you don’t actually use.

Cloudamize Delivers Deeper Savings

Cloudamize now fully supports core reduction for both Windows Server and SQL Server licenses-included instances.

Our Cloudamize Assessment is designed to identify and execute this optimization. Over a two-week period, we collect performance data to determine the true in-cloud resource needs for each workload. This analysis pinpoints exactly how many cores are required versus how many are provisioned, revealing the precise opportunity for core reduction and license savings.

Customer Success Story:

A recent Cloudamize assessment of 1,619 servers helped a customer achieve substantial cloud savings:

  • $2.0 Million in license fees via reduced core optimization.
  • $14.6 Million saved through Cloudamize workload right-sizing.

>$16M

Total Cloud Savings

 

Customer Estate and Core Reduction Impact

The customer’s 1,619-server estate included: 1,231 Windows Servers (without SQL), 216 Windows Servers with SQL Server, and 172 Linux servers.

Server Type Number of Servers Total Cores Before Total Cores After Cores Reduced License Savings
Windows (without SQL) 1,231 11,124 10,406 718 $289,325
SQL Server Enterprise 78 1,768 1,388 380 $1,401,424
SQL Server Standard 138 1,230 1,016 214 $311,190
Totals 1,447 14,122 12,810 1,312 $2,001,939

 

Ready to stop paying for unused licenses? Contact Cloudamize today to begin your optimization assessment.

Author

Todd Erickson
Sr Product Architect