This is great for (warning: potentially limited use case ahead) engineering companies* who run large analysis clusters for specialty Simulation/CFD software. Especially those frustrated by their vendors current or (non-existent) cloud processing offerings.
A lot of software in this space, for instance, has a fixed MAC address requirement for their license servers, and you report/pay depending on the number of cores. Whilst you can get around that sometimes, it would certainly void agreements and wouldn't hold up in an audit.
In some companies I've worked, this could drastically reduce the capital costs for engineers needing overpowered workstations that are analogous to Ferraris you only take out on weekends.
*who are already using AWS in other parts of their infrastructure.
Other place where this is great is enterprise cloud migration and hybrid cloud formation.
When one decides to go cloud, you need to throw away you prior investment in SO licenses and hardware. Although you have no alternative but throw away hardware, being able to reuse investment in software greatly reduce migration costs.
Of course one can just wait until all his licenses expire and then migrate, but such a hard migration would increase risks.
And of course it would be nice to have a price comparison between running normal instances and using a dedicated host with my own licenses, but without deeper inspection, dedicated is cheaper.
A lot of software in this space, for instance, has a fixed MAC address requirement for their license servers, and you report/pay depending on the number of cores. Whilst you can get around that sometimes, it would certainly void agreements and wouldn't hold up in an audit.
In some companies I've worked, this could drastically reduce the capital costs for engineers needing overpowered workstations that are analogous to Ferraris you only take out on weekends.
*who are already using AWS in other parts of their infrastructure.