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We have a product and we would like to give it in AWS as AMI. My questions here is How can I provide AMI with free Licence Key if suppose some xx days it's expires the end user should not able to re-use the key. In non cloud environment we are taking primary key as mac address for licensing whereas in cloud how can we proceed.

prem
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  • Use the date! Issue them with a key that only works until a particular date, then enforce that in your application. Your app could consult a NTP time server to check whether it has expired. – John Rotenstein Mar 28 '17 at 08:40
  • @JohnRotenstein The user can create an server any number by deleting it and he can able to recreate it again. So If i give them a licence he delete the server and create a new server and use the licence free trial for particuar days. So How can I overcome that? – prem Mar 28 '17 at 09:11

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The application on the AMI needs to reference some external resource to determine whether it should run.

For example:

  • A user goes to your website and requests a trial license.
  • Your website verifies their eligibility, provides a license key and stores the expiry time for the license key.
  • The application on the AMI should "call home" to your website at regular intervals to determine whether the license key is still valid.

Alternatively, you could base it on a timestamp:

  • A user goes to your website and requests a trial license.
  • Your website verifies their eligibility and generates an encrypted file that contains a timestamp with the end-time of the trial.
  • The user inserts installs this encrypted file in the EC2 instance.
  • The app on the instance regularly checks the file -- it decrypts it, looks at the timestamp, calls an NTP server and confirms that the time period has not expired. If it has expired, further use is not permitted.

Both these examples require your own website to determine eligibility. Otherwise, as you point out, users could create trial licenses forever.

John Rotenstein
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  • On non clouded environment We are giving the product with trial key. The user can download our product and use the key to activate the product with our license. The key will expire in 7 days based on the mac address he could not able to use it whereas he can use the same . for another 7 days for free. My question is how can We do the same thin on cloud like AWS AMI or AZURE? – prem Mar 28 '17 at 10:31
  • For now we are providing our product like downloading it and use it for 7 days. After 7 day's it's expired based on MAC address. Whereas he can reuse it buy installing the product on different machine. My question is the same thing is possible on AMAZON AMI with monthly Licensing or weekly Licensing and not hourly. As mentioned earlier if i provide it via AMI they can terminate the instance and recreate. because our product is looking mac address on non clouded. How can I look for AWS as unique key? – prem Mar 28 '17 at 10:36
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    Each EC2 instance has a unique ID. The ID is available via [instance metadata](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/ec2-instance-metadata.html). – John Rotenstein Mar 28 '17 at 23:35