Does using secondary replica for read operations still required license? I wanted to move some of the reporting workload to the secondary replica but the following things stopped me:


no writes can be performed (including creating temporary tables); 
a license is required;


I guess I might get it wrong... I've checked the docs again and it is said that:


  Though you cannot write data to secondary databases, you can write to
  read-write databases on the server instance that hosts the secondary
  replica, including user databases and system databases such as tempdb.


which basically means I can execute every reporting query.

But I am not able to find any information about the licensing in the docs. Is the licensing requirement off, now?
Yes, it required license as both of the instances are active/running.

Availability Group has set of databases that you want to synchronize to secondary replica. It's not necessary to add all databases to availability group, you can add the databases for which you want fault tolerance.

So if your primary replica goes down only those database are part of the availability group would fail-over to secondary &amp; it becomes primary.

MS doesn't restrict you to use the secondary nodes having read-only secondary replica for read-only purpose only, you can also create and use databases on the secondary nodes.

So, it needs a license for secondary replica whether you use it for read-only or read-write both.

Thanks!