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Entitlement Management Service

Licensing overview

While Entitlement v4 stores which user or what device is assigned a license to a product, it is not a complete licensing system. Licensing systems typically focus on factors such as low-latency license verification, domain-specific license information, and license enforcement. The following information outlines some of the key differences:

Products are responsible for license enforcement. Entitlement provides information to enable licensing systems and license enforcement.

What is license enforcement? License enforcement is a process of verifying whether the terms of the license are met. The following are some of the examples of license enforcement:

  • Verifying if a user logging into a product is assigned a license for that product.
  • Verifying if a device is under the licensed quota of data transfer.

Entitlement enables these enforcement checks by storing:

  • Who or what is assigned a license and
  • Feature usage limits and current amounts

However, Entitlement cannot control whether the products enforce these checks. The behavior of a product wholly depends on the rules set by the product team. They (product team) can choose who is allowed to use the product and what limits are applicable to the product like data usage limits. Most groups decide to build their own licensing layer on top of Entitlement to control license enforcement, rather than relying only on the simple mechanisms provided in the Entitlement.