Posted On: Jul 31, 2020

Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations now allows you to bring your own licenses (BYOL) of Windows operating systems. With this release, you can now create an EC2 Capacity Reservation and launch EC2 instances, running your existing Windows licenses, into the Capacity Reservation.  

EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations let you reserve Amazon EC2 capacity for any duration. You can reserve the exact capacity you need, in the location you need, and can keep it only for as long as you need it. On-Demand Capacity Reservations are activated as soon as they are requested, and they stay active until cancelled. Once created, the EC2 capacity is held for you regardless of whether you run the instances or not.  

To use this feature, first, you create a Capacity Reservation by specifying the platform as “Windows BYOL”. Then, you can launch your instances into the Capacity Reservation by selecting your Windows BYOL Amazon Machine Image (AMI).  

You can create and manage Capacity Reservations through the Amazon CloudFormation, Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon SDKs or Amazon Command Line Interface (CLI). To learn more about Capacity Reservations, visit FAQs, Linux or Windows user guide. To learn more about adding Capacity Reservations to your CloudFormation template, visit CloudFormation user guide.