Oracle licensing on AWS

I may have blogged about this already, but want to give more detail as this question keeps coming up. Customers and partners want to know specifically how licenses purchased from Oracle or used on AWS as part of their ULA and ELA agreements are converted to cores and sockets on AWS.  Here is an example that I believe will clear things up:

1. Standard Edition - EC2 instances with 4 or less virtual cores are counted as 1 socket, which is considered equivalent to a processor license. For EC2 instances with more than 4 virtual cores, every 4 virtual cores used (rounded up to the closest multiple of 4) equate to a licensing requirement of 1 socket.  This means that running on m1.small, m1.medium, m1.large and m1.xlarge will all cost the same from an Oracle perspective. Details are: "When licensing Oracle programs with Standard Edition One or Standard Edition in the product name, the pricing is based on the size of the EC2 instances. Authorized Cloud Environment instances with 4 or fewer virtual cores are counted as 1 socket, which is considered equivalent to a processor license. For Authorized Cloud Environment instances with more than 4 virtual cores, every 4 virtual cores used (rounded up to the closest multiple of 4) equate to a licensing requirement of 1 socket."
2. Enterprise Edition - .5 multiplier which means you need 1 Oracle license for every 2 virtual cores on EC2.  This means that  running on m1.small, m1.medium, and  m1.large will all cost the same from an Oracle perspective.  Running on m1.xlarge would cost double the price since it has 4 virtual cores.

A virtual core is not the same as a vCPU. More on virtual cores here: http://aws.amazon.com/jp/ec2/virtualcores/

All the details can be found on the Oracle web site here:
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf 

Of course, you should check with Oracle to make sure that you are in compliance.