Licensing Challenges in a Cloud Environment

The fundamental concept of software licensing involves binding the license to characteristics of the physical machine on which the software resides and, for served licenses, on which the license server resides. These characteristics, called binding elements, include machine identities such as the Ethernet address or the host name. However, a cloud environment runs on virtual machines that are instantiated and brought down frequently. Consequently, the traditional hardware-based binding elements are not reliable in a cloud environment. Additionally, the FlexNet Publisher bare-metal-bindings (BMB) feature available in prior releases for on-premises virtual machines is unusable in a cloud environment; the license administrator does not have access to the physical hardware on which the virtual instances are running. This access is a prerequisite for the BMB feature.

A public cloud provider charges the customer based on the number of hours a machine instance is used. To optimize billing charges, a user typically stops or terminates an instance when it is not in use. This type of stop-restart usage is contrary to the on-premises machine usage, which is typically continuous.Therefore, the ideal binding element in the cloud environment is one that has these attributes:

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Globally unique within the cloud infrastructure to prevent over-licensing by cloned images

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Unchanging between normal start/stop, suspend/resume, live-process migration, and reboots of machine instances

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Not easily changed by the user

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Not usable when the license is outside the cloud

FlexNet Publisher provides licensing solutions that meet these binding-element requirements. These solutions are based on typical licensing use cases in a cloud environment and are within the scope of cloud-licensing support for this release.