ColdFusion Licence for fail over clusters

[lajin mohan_294]

Hi I'm planning to setup a highly available and scalable ColdFusion server on AWS. If I purchase a single ColdFusion Enterprise licence, can I install it on multiple EC2 instances? These can be fail over clusters or auto scaling groups.

[WolfShade]

I'm no expert at CF licensing, but I believe that you have to set an upper and lower limit on the number of instances that can be spun-up, and pay for the maximum.  So, if you set a minimum of one and a maximum of ten, you purchase ten licenses.  At least I think that's the way it works.  I don't think Adobe has gone the route of Oracle, who will charge based upon the number of virtual cores that each VM will use.

My assessment could be wrong.

V/r,

^ _ ^

[Dave Watts]

My understanding is the same as Wolfshade's: you need to pay for each production EC2 instance on which you run CF. (And that's how we've been charging our customers, so ...)

But there is a "rental" option in EC2. There's a custom AMI in the AWS Marketplace that has CF preinstalled on Windows. If you use that, you'll pay an extra monthly fee. If you're ok with running CF on Windows, you could use this to avoid paying for additional licenses. That said, the rental cost is pretty high and equals the regular license cost over a pretty short period of time. So, you might want to see if you can purchase licenses for the minimum number of instances in your pool, and then rent the additional EC2 instances as you scale up. This might be a little complicated, as you'd need to use two different AMIs to create the pool which is a little unusual.

Another problem with the rental option is that you're stuck with what they give you and how it's configured, etc. In other words, whatever CF version is available in it, and it's running Windows. I like Windows but I generally try to use Linux when building AWS solutions because it works more easily. But now there is a good file-sharing mechanism for Windows in AWS that was just released in the latest re:Invent, so Windows is a better option than it was before.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC