Skip to content

MyEngFlow License Server

A customer's contract includes which capabilities the customer's Remote Execution may use. To ensure these limitations are adhered to, the EngFlow services running on the cluster need to have a valid license. While this license can be provided as a static file, the services can also contact the MyEngFlow License Server.

If enabled, by default the license server is contacted every 2 hours to receive an up-to-date license. Currently, this includes temporal extensions which are applied immediately. Static license files, on the other hand, need the cluster to be rolled, which usually takes more time and can lead to temporary performance degradation. Note the default behavior can be customized, see details here.

The data exchanged between the customer cluster and the license server is encrypted. The EngFlow service contacts the license server by opening a gRPC connection over https using a TLS certificate stored in the customer's cluster. Each request sent consists of an Authorization header, as well as the following two data points:

  • An id to identify the instance sending the request, and
  • an id to identify the contract for which the instance is requesting a license.

The license server responds with a signed license. The license's signature is used to verify whether the EngFlow service can trust the license.

For production clusters, the license returned has a validity of 14 days. This ensures that the cluster can continue to run smoothly even if the license server cannot be reached temporarily.

The MyEngFlow License Server is monitored closely. Additionally, the customer cluster will alert EngFlow oncall, if the service's license has a remaining validity of less than 7 days. This measure further safe-guards against outages due to expired licenses.

Overall, using MyEngFlow license server ensures the EngFlow cluster can reliably run, leveraging the most recent capabilities agreed upon. Extensions of a contract can be applied without requiring a new deploy and restarting instances, which is a clear advantage compared to using static license files.