Unlock license mobility with Bring Your Own Media on fully managed Amazon RDS for SQL Server
Source: AWS - Databases
For years, the case for moving enterprise workloads to the cloud was centered on manageability, elasticity, and cost. These are important reasons, but organizations need to justify them against existing licensing commitments and sunk infrastructure investments. Agentic AI applications have changed that calculus. These applications depend on elastic GPU capacity, low-latency access to modern AI services, and AI models that can directly access the data they reason over. That foundation is increasingly difficult to replicate in a self-managed data center. On-premises infrastructure is no longer only harder to manage. Its limited access to agentic AI cloud-native services is becoming a ceiling on what your business can build next.
That ceiling shows up wherever operational data lives. For many enterprises, a large share of that data lives in Microsoft SQL Server, powering customer records, orders, inventory, and line-of-business systems. For those customers, the blocker hasn’t been the want to move. It has been the licensing investments already in place. Until now, customers with Software Assurance could only bring their SQL Server licenses to AWS on self-managed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) through Microsoft’s License Mobility program. For a fully managed database like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), customers with existing SQL Server licenses had to pay for licensing a second time through the License Included model.
Bring Your Own Media (BYOM) on Amazon RDS for SQL Server solves this problem. You can bring your existing SQL Server installation media and the licenses you have already invested in. You then use them on RDS for SQL Server, a fully managed database service, with no additional licensing fees. With BYOM, you can reuse your existing SQL Server Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition licenses. If you have configured AWS License Manager, BYOM instances are automatically tracked, giving you continuous visibility into SQL Server license usage and compliance. For customers ready to make the move, Amazon RDS provides a lift-and-shift path that lands your SQL Server operational data in a fully managed environment. RDS automates patching, backups, high availability, and monitoring while providing direct reach to the agentic AI and analytics services native to AWS.
In this post, you learn how to upload your SQL Server installation media to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and launch a BYOM instance.
Solution overview
To reuse your existing SQL Server licenses, licensing distribution terms require that you provide your licensed SQL Server Release to Manufacturing (RTM) media to Amazon RDS. With BYOM, you upload your RTM media from the AWS Console. To get started, you upload your Release to Manufacturing (RTM) media to Amazon S3 and launch your fully managed RDS for SQL Server BYOM instances against it. With AWS License Manager, Amazon RDS automatically detects BYOM instances and reports vCPU usage, giving you continuous visibility into SQL Server license consumption. You remain responsible for license compliance.
In the Amazon RDS Console, you can create an RDS for SQL Server BYOM instance directly from the Create database page.
Walkthrough
This section walks through creating a BYOM instance with SQL Server 2022 Standard Edition.
Prerequisites
Before getting started, you need to verify that you have an active SQL Server license (Standard or Enterprise Edition) with Software Assurance. You must submit a License Mobility Verification Form to Microsoft, available here.
Step 1: Download SQL Server RTM media from your Visual Studio subscription
First, you need to get your SQL Server RTM media into an S3 bucket where Amazon RDS can access it. You can download the RTM ISO file from Microsoft through your Visual Studio subscription if you have an active subscription. You can also download it from the Microsoft 365 admin center if you purchased products through volume licensing.
On the download page, search for “SQL Server 2022” (or your target version) and locate SQL Server 2022 Standard. Select English as the language (other languages are not supported) and choose ISO as the download format.
Note: Use English language and a core-based licensing RTM ISO file.
Step 2: Upload files to Amazon S3
If you don’t already have an S3 bucket, choose Create bucket and give it a unique name (in this example, we use sqlserver-byom-media). Then choose Add files, select the SQL Server RTM media file, and choose Upload to start the transfer.
Step 3: Create your first BYOM instance
With your RTM media in S3, you are ready to create your first BYOM instance. The first time you launch an instance for a given major version, the Amazon RDS Console handles two operations behind the scenes in a single workflow. It creates the BYOM engine version (approximately 20 minutes) from your RTM media and then launches the instance against that BYOM engine version.
- Open the Amazon RDS console and choose Databases in the left navigation pane.
- Choose Create database.
- Under Engine options, configure the following:
- Engine type: Select Microsoft SQL Server
- Database management type: Select Amazon RDS
- Edition: Select SQL Server Standard Edition
- License model: Select bring-your-own-media
- Major version: SQL Server 2022
- Minor engine version: Choose your target version (for example, 16.00.4245.2.v1)
- Under SQL Server RTM media from S3 (appears for first-time per major version) Browse S3: Select the RTM file from your bucket name (
sqlserver-byom-media) and select the ISO file: For example: “Enu_sql_server_2022_standard_core_edition_x64_dvd.iso” - DB instance identifier: Enter a name (for example, sqlserver-se-2022-byom)
- Configure the remaining settings (DB instance class, storage, connectivity, authentication, backups, and maintenance) as you would for a License Included instance.
- Review all settings and choose Create database.
Note: Use the English-language, core-based licensing RTM ISO file.
Important limitations and considerations
You should keep the following considerations in mind when you are using BYOM on Amazon RDS for SQL Server.
First, you are responsible for verifying that your SQL Server licenses comply with Microsoft’s licensing agreement. Using AWS License Manager, you can track your license usage, but AWS does not block operations if license limits are exceeded. Compliance is the customer’s responsibility.
Second, RTM files must use core-based licensing and English language only. Otherwise, BYOM engine version creation will fail.
Finally, keep in mind that a BYOM engine version cannot be deleted while any associated RDS instances, snapshots, or backups still exist.
Clean up
To avoid ongoing charges, delete resources from this walkthrough when they are no longer needed.
- Delete the RDS instance: Go to the RDS Console → select Databases → select your instance → Actions → Delete
- Delete S3 objects and bucket: Go to the S3 Console → select bucket → Empty → Delete bucket
Conclusion
You do not need to choose between protecting your SQL Server licensing investments and giving your data a path to the AWS analytics and agentic AI services redefining what’s possible in the cloud. Bring Your Own Media on Amazon RDS for SQL Server is the path forward. If you have Software Assurance, you can use Microsoft’s License Mobility program to bring your existing SQL Server Standard or Enterprise Edition licenses to a fully managed Amazon RDS environment. With Amazon RDS, you benefit from automated backups, monitoring, patching, and high availability.
In this post, you learned how to get started with Bring Your Own Media (BYOM) on Amazon RDS for SQL Server. The walkthrough covered uploading your Release to Manufacturing (RTM) file to S3 and creating a BYOM engine version.
What used to be a licensing barrier between operational SQL Server data and agentic AI is now gone. To learn more about Bring Your Own Media support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server,you can use the following resources:
- Amazon RDS for SQL Server documentation
- AWS License Manager documentation
- create-custom-db-engine-version CLI reference
BYOM is available in all commercial AWS Regions where Amazon RDS for SQL Server is supported. For the latest availability, see the Amazon RDS for SQL Server pricing page. If you have questions or suggestions, leave a comment on this post.