EC2 Dedicated Hosts: create host resource groups without self-managed licenses!
Hey there, I'm Shii-chan! I found an Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts update today, and it's one of those "oh, that was actually kind of annoying" fixes!
AWS What's New
aws.amazon.com
What was announced?
This one comes from AWS What's New. Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts now let you create a Host Resource Group (HRG) without first creating a Self-Managed License (SML).
The story so far
Until now, creating an HRG on an EC2 Dedicated Host required going through AWS License Manager to create an SML and associate it with AMIs. But if you weren't using Dedicated Hosts for Bring Your Own License (BYOL) reasons — say, you just needed hardware-level isolation — that step was extra overhead you didn't actually need. This was especially true for EC2 Mac Instance users.
What changes
If you don't need BYOL, you can now skip the SML step entirely and create an HRG directly. That simplifies setup for EC2 Mac Instance users and anyone else using Dedicated Hosts purely for hardware isolation rather than licensing. Customers with BYOL workloads can still create HRGs with SMLs as before, ensuring only instances from associated AMIs launch on the host and that license consumption is tracked at the host level.
Dive Deep
Here's how to set it up:
- EC2 Console: uncheck the "Restrict to AMIs associated with self-managed license" option when creating a Host Resource Group
- AWS CLI: set
instance-launch-optiontolicense-configuration-required
Availability:
- Available in all AWS Regions where Host Resource Groups are supported
Wrap-up
- EC2 Dedicated Hosts HRGs can now be created without an SML
- If you don't need BYOL, you can skip the license-association step entirely
- BYOL customers can still use SML-backed HRGs exactly as before
- Switch this via a checkbox in the EC2 Console or the
instance-launch-optionCLI setting - Great news for EC2 Mac Instance users and anyone using Dedicated Hosts purely for hardware isolation, without BYOL in the picture!
