Licensing Software That Runs on Ephemeral CI and Cloud Build Agents Without Burning Seats

Licensing software for ephemeral Continuous Integration (CI) and cloud build agents is a challenge because these agents exist for the duration of a single job before disappearing. Pointing a node-locked license at such an environment results in every build being treated as a new machine, leading to consumption of a seat before the machine is destroyed.

A ten-seat license can be exhausted before lunch. The solution is not to increase the number of seats; instead, the license should be tied to the dimension that actually varies. Node-locking assumes a machine stays put, but CI and cloud build agents are designed to be ephemeral. When a node-locked seat is consumed by a CI runner, it is not deactivated but rather deleted, leaving the seat indefinitely occupied.

This leads to seats being consumed faster than any manual process can free them. The fix is to license the dimension that actually varies, namely the number of concurrent or total uses. Three options are available to fit ephemeral compute: floating/concurrency licensing, build-scoped entitlements, and metered builds. Floating/concurrency licensing limits the number of simultaneous builds, while build-scoped entitlements validate a signed token offline, and metered builds count builds as usage against a quota.

The key is to detect when the software is running in CI and route the job to the appropriate licensing model, without writing a per-machine activation. Keyright supports all three models and allows licensing ephemeral CI and autoscaled agents based on concurrency or usage instead of machine count, preventing seat exhaustion.