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Licensing Overview

This page explains how KX licensing is managed.

All KX products require a license. KX offers licensing based on provisioned RAM capacity, number of licensed cores, or by number of named users. For more information, contact KX at sales@kx.com.

Production Definition

Use of KX software in the normal course of business is considered as production use. Non-production use of KX software includes but is not limited to evaluation, migration, fault diagnosis, internal benchmarking, staging, quality assurance, internal development and testing in connection with the functionality of the product, or for backup or disaster recovery. No work to support a production environment is permitted in a non-production environment. For the avoidance of doubt, the use of the non-production environment for manipulation or review of data or data sources for production of analytics, algorithms, visualisations and reports or extensions to the software for use in the normal course of business is considered production use.

Provisioned RAM-based Licensing

In environments where KX software is licensed based on the provisioned RAM capacity, KX requires that self-managed commercial customers audit their RAM capacity for their deployment type, to comply with the KX Software Usage Terms.

  • For physical hosts/VMs this is the entire, provisioned RAM available
  • For containerized environments this is RAM available to pods/containers/cgroups

If an environment is not formally containerized, the recommendation is to formally containerize or use Control Groups (cgroups) so that the provisioned RAM capacity for KX processes can be limited to them. Otherwise, the full RAM available to the environment is used as the measure.

Refer to RAM Capacity Reporting for guidance on how to report provisioned RAM to KX.

The self-service licensing model previously in use for KX products has been deprecated. Contact your sales representative if you have questions about this, and wish to discuss moving to the new model.

Cores-based Licensing

In environments where KX software is licensed based on the number of cores, KX requires that self-managed commercial customers audit their cores for their deployment type, to comply with the KX Software Usage Terms - Cores.

Refer to Cores Reporting for guidance on how to report licensed cores numbers to KX.

User-based Licensing

In environments where KX software is licensed based on the number of users, KX requires that self-managed commercial customers audit their users for their deployment type, to comply with the KX Software Usage Terms - Users.

Refer to Users Reporting for guidance on how to report licensed user numbers to KX.

License types

  • Trial - these are generated automatically during the sign-up process. They require a public internet connection in order to work and are not issued for use in Production environments. After sign-up, you should receive a welcome email that includes a link to download the license file to your local environment. It also contains a Base64 encoded string that can be used in conjunction with an environment variable. The license is a file named kc.lic.

  • Commercial - these are distributed by KX's license administration service. They do not require a public internet connection and so are suitable for air-gapped, fire-walled deployments. The term of a commercial license is agreed as part of the product purchase. Upon agreement, you should receive a welcome email with a link to your license. This license is a file named k4.lic.

  • Proofs of concept, bespoke evaluations or emergency licenses - a short-term license can be provided in proof of concept, bespoke evaluations or emergency situations. Contact your sales representative to get this type of license. These are provided by KX's license administration team.

Go here for details on licenses installation.