License entitlements for specific tenants in a multi-tenant application

How do I?
,
1

We are looking to license our multi-tenant SaaS application for on-prem installations. We’re thinking about how we can grant entitlements to specific tenants through the Replicated license feature. One thought is to embed a json blob in a custom field but I’m not sure if there is a size restriction. That is our fallback if/when we need this capability.

I’m wondering if anyone has used the license key to grant entitlements to specific tenants (or equivalent) within their application. How creative have you gotten with license fields and entitlements in general?

Thanks,
-nate

2

Hi Nate - answering a couple of your questions below.

One thought is to embed a json blob in a custom field but I’m not sure if there is a size restriction.

I believe there is a hard limit of 64kb on license fields.

I’m wondering if anyone has used the license key to grant entitlements to specific tenants (or equivalent) within their application.

We do support checking license entitlements at runtime within your application. Linking to some docs pages that describe this:

Hope this is helpful. Let us know if you do have any other questions.

3

Hi Craig,

Thanks for the response.

64kb limit is good to know.

Regarding the license entitlements, I am aware of the license check capabilities and that is what I’m planning or at least trying to use. Perhaps I can be more clear about my scenario.

(This is totally hypothetical to make the question clear.) We have one application that is “multi-tenant”. Our enterprise customer deploys the application in there infrastructure using a license key they download through Replicated. The enterprise customer plans on giving access to various business units but do not want to pay for all the features (via entitlements) for every business unit. I’m looking for a good way to provide a single license to enable entitlement A only for a specific tenant (business unit) but entitlement B for all tenants.

My blob idea simply uses the field to include a json list of authorized tenants.

Although a hypothetical situation, it is interesting for us, locally, because it would allow us to run our SaaS deployment using the Replicated platform and manage entitlements for our tenants using the license file. This means we don’t have to create a separate license manager for our SaaS while using the Replicated SDK for on-prem customers.

I have many ideas how to do this but wanted to check if I’m missing something obvious.

Thanks again!
-nate

4

Ah, got it. Thanks for that explanation. I think including the authorized tenants list within a single license field would be a reasonable approach (assuming the 64kb limit isn’t an issue) as I don’t believe we have a way to configure entitlements on a “per-tenant” basis for a single license. I’ll check and see if anyone has come across this situation and might know of any other alternatives.

5

Thanks, Craig. I am confident we’ll come up with something good.