A company runs a legacy Windows Server workload under an existing license that is bound to specific physical processor sockets and cores, and it must be able to report the exact host ID, socket count, and core count its instances run on for compliance purposes. Which EC2 tenancy option satisfies both requirements?
- Default (shared) tenancy
- Dedicated Instances
- Dedicated Hosts
- A cluster placement group
Correct answer: C. Dedicated Hosts
A Dedicated Host is a physical server fully dedicated to a single AWS account, and unlike other tenancy options it exposes the host's identifier along with its exact number of sockets and physical cores, plus the ability to target specific instances to specific hosts, which is precisely what socket- or core-bound licensing terms and compliance reporting require. Dedicated Instances also run on hardware dedicated to a single account, but the account has no visibility into or control over the underlying host's identity, sockets, or cores, so they cannot support socket-bound license reporting even though they satisfy general single-tenant isolation. Default shared tenancy explicitly allows hardware to be shared with other AWS customers, which immediately disqualifies it for hardware-bound licensing. A cluster placement group only affects the network placement of instances for low-latency, high-throughput communication and has no relationship to tenancy, hardware visibility, or licensing at all.
Source: AWS documentation: Dedicated Hosts versus Dedicated Instances