Hi Jag,
Bundling Amazon EC2 AMIs containing Lightstreamer Server works great. As you pointed out, the only caveat is the licensing system. All
Lightstreamer licenses, except for the Eval licenses, are currently bound to a MAC address of the hosting machine. With the raise of virtualization solutions, where the MAC address is totally arbitrary and sometimes changeable, we understand that this kind of licensing paradigm is probably no more flexible enough.
For what concerns EC2, the MAC address does not change on reboot, but only when a new instance is started (even if the previous one was terminated). So, it is not very different than a traditional physical machine. If it breaks and you have to migrate Lightstreamer to a new machine, we will give you a new license key.
There exist some workarounds proposed to choose the MAC address of an EC2 machine (for example, see
here), but we would like to come up with some new licensing mechanism that is fully compliant with the virtualization and cloud paradigms, without sacrificing our right to keep control on how many instances of Lightstreamer Server are deployed around. By the way, if anyone has any or suggestion idea on this topic, please let us know!
Cheers,
Alessandro
