How does billing work when purchasing a RI and launching an instance that runs a marketplace software that also charges for a software license (say the Cisco CSR1000v, $0.622/hr as of today)? Is the license cost per year added on top of the RI price?
Thank you.
From an AWS perspective the software charge and the underlying EC2 instance charge are separate. You can see in this image below the $0.622/hr charge is the software charge when running on a T2 Medium instance, but that the instance charge is a separate column $0.046 which is the On Demand pricing for the US East N. Virginia region.
When you purchase an RI for (in this example) a T2 Medium, AWS automatically discounts based on the inventory that matches. So if you had started the Cisco Marketplace item running on a T2 Medium and had purchased a T2 Medium RI that was not matched to any other existing instance, then you would see a discount for the compute automatically.
More details: How Reserved Instances Are Applied
