AWS License Manager integration with Red Hat Subscription Manager

AWS customers can quickly deploy and scale compute resources based on their business needs, offering flexible purchase options for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and RHEL with High Availability (HA). The Pay-as-you-go model allows users to provision resources on demand, accommodating growth in computing needs without requiring long-term commitments or upfront costs. For those looking to save, the Savings Plans offer a flexible pricing model that can reduce bills by up to 72% compared to On-Demand prices in exchange for a one or three year hourly spend commitment. Additionally, customers with existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux Premium subscriptions can upload their own Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to AWS, or use ready-to-deploy Red Hat certified gold images which are available through Red Hat Cloud Access. Additionally, maintaining subscription compliance and managing costs are of paramount concern to enterprise customers, especially when trying to corelate workloads with subscriptions for charge back and internal billing.

AWS License Manager can already used to discover and track RHEL instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) launched from AWS-provided Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

AWS License Manager now integrates with Red Hat Subscription Manager (RHSM) to provide greater insight into your consumption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on EC2. Integrating License Manager with RHSM allows customers to see information about instances launched from custom RHEL images as well. The new feature will help customers discover RHEL instances and subscriptions in use on AWS, and identify potential cases of double payment where an instance has subscriptions assigned from both AWS and Red Hat assigned to it.

With instance and subscription data from RHSM accessible directly in License Manager, customers can better manage cost and compliance of your RHEL usage on AWS.

Getting Started:

Visit the AWS License Manager console and select the Linux subscriptions tab in the left panel. First time users will be directed to select the region you want the Linux subscriptions data to be gathered from, and set-up linking with AWS Organizations to see a cross-account view.

AWS Subscription Manager

Below we can see the Red Hat Subscription Manager being connected to the AWS License Manager, which starts with the Linux subscriptions discovery.

Setup Subscription Discovery

Clicking on the “Set up Linux subscription discovery” above takes us to the below page where we select one or more Regions from which the Linux subscriptions will be discovered and aggregated.

To discover information on Bring Your Own Subscriptions (BYOS) from the Red Hat Subscription Manager (RHSM) click on the “Activated Red Hat Subscription Manager (RHSM) discovery” checkbox, and grant the AWS License Manager permission to create a service-linked role for Linux Subscriptions.

Subscription discovery configuration

We selected us-west-1, us-west-2, us-east-1, and us-east-2 as the Regions from which Linux subscriptions will be discovered and aggregated.

Subscription discovery configuration

To link the RHSM account the Red Hat offline access token is stored in AWS Secrets Manager, the License Manager uses the secret to generate a temporary access token each time it requests subscription details from Red Hat. Finally, grant AWS License Manager permission to create a service-link role for Linux Subscriptions, and approve it to access Red Hat Subscription Services to retrieve details of the Red Hat Subscriptions.

Subscription discovery configuration

Subscription discovery configuration

We can read through the following article for more detail on the process of generating a new offline token

Once the Red Hat Subscription Manager (RHSM) discovery is activated, we can see a timestamp appear under the “Last data synchronized on” field. It can take some time for the first sync to complete.

Subscription Discovery activated

Single pane of glass, seeing the integration in action:

We also launched a collection of EC2 instances in this AWS account, one is a PAYGO instance, and the second one is a PAYGO EC2 instance that has a Red Hat Subscription registered to it.

EC2 instance view

Looking at the Instances in the EC2 console, we can see the instances that we have in our AWS account, the first one is a Pay-Go instance in Region us-east-2, while the second one is a RHEL Server BYOS instance which image we created using the Red Hat Image Builder tool in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, and the third instance is the Pay-Go instance which has the RH Subscription Manager registered to it.

We can see that that third RHEL instance has “Duplication alert” tagged to it. The message says, “Duplicate subscription detected – License Manager detected two Linux license subscriptions on the instance”. This helps identify situations where we could potentially be double paying.

Duplicate Subscription detected

Setting Alarms:

From the License Manager console, select Subscriptions from the left hand pane, then select ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server’ and click on the View details button. This will take us to a page with details about the instance, where we can also set an alarm by clicking on the ‘Usage metrics and alarm’ tab.

Alert Configuration

We can then set Alarms as shown below, these Amazon CloudWatch alarms send an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) message when the value of the metric changes and causes the alarm to change state. An alarm watches a metric over a time period we specify, and performs actions based on the value of the metric relative to a given threshold over a number of time periods. Alarms invoke actions for sustained state changes only.

Alert Configuration

Conclusion:

In summary, integrating License Manager with Red Hat Subscription Manager (RHSM) helps identify potential areas for cost mitigations and subscription compliance across customer hybrid estate. With more and more customer bringing existing Red Hat investments to the cloud and seeking flexibility of licensing and subscription procurement options, having a consolidated view which integrates directly into the EC2 console is a welcome addition to any customer’s Technical Business Management (TMB) tool box.

If you are attending Amazon Re:Invent in Las Vegas this December come and join us for the “AWS License Manager integration with Red Hat Subscription Manager” presentation and demo at the Red Hat booth.

Reference:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pdfs/license-manager/latest/userguide/license-manager.pdf