The key quote from the article is: "Beginning October 1, 2019, on-premises licenses purchased without Software Assurance and mobility rights cannot be deployed

The key quote from the article is: "Beginning October 1, 2019, on-premises licenses purchased without Software Assurance and mobility rights cannot be deployed with dedicated hosted cloud services offered by the following public cloud providers: Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon (including VMware Cloud on AWS), and Google. They will be referred to as "Listed Providers."" It seems like Microsoft is reverting to it's bad-old-ways in terms of licensing tricks and traps.