License Administration Guide - norsar

16Licensing in a Cloud-ComputingEnvironmentThis chapter provides the following information to help the license administrator implement secure softwarelicensing in a cloud-computing:• Licensing Challenges in a Cloud Environment• Scope of Support for Cloud Licensing• Use Cases for Licensing Software in the Cloud• Hostids for BindingNote • For simplification, the remainder of this chapter refers to the cloud-computing environment as the cloudenvironment.Licensing Challenges in a Cloud EnvironmentThe fundamental concept of software licensing involves binding the license to characteristics of the physicalmachine on which the software resides and, for served licenses, on which the license server resides. Thesecharacteristics, 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-premisesvirtual machines is unusable in a cloud environment; the license administrator does not have access to thephysical 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. Tooptimize billing charges, a user typically stops or terminates an instance when it is not in use. This type of stoprestartusage is contrary to the on-premises machine usage, which is typically continuous.Therefore, the idealbinding element in the cloud environment is one that has these attributes:• Globally unique within the cloud infrastructure to prevent over-licensing by cloned imagesLicense Administration Guide FNP-11111-LAG01 191