Licensing MSDN Subscriptions for Application Development

Many organizations use Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscriptions for access to Microsoft’s development tools, OSs, server applications, and Azure services to design, develop, and test applications. This gives organizations a convenient method for licensing Microsoft software and services used by an application until the application is deployed in production. Although rules for MSDN subscriptions may appear straightforward—software and services are licensed by per-user subscriptions but limited to nonproduction use—licensing model nuances, such as who can access the software and services during the application development life-cycle, make compliance challenging.

Generally, an MSDN subscription licenses software and services for evaluation or for the design, development, testing, and demonstration of applications that use the software and services, up until the time the application is put into production.

The software included with any MSDN subscription may be installed and run on any number of devices, and devices can be located at home or in work environments. Devices can include on-premises physical hardware or on-premises virtual machines (VMs). The software included in an MSDN subscription can be used with Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings.