Enterprise: AWS Marketplace

FlexFS Enterprise Edition is available in AWS Marketplace as a pay-as-you-go subscription. FlexFS runs entirely in your own AWS account, and storage usage is billed through your AWS bill. There is no upfront commitment.

Subscribe and get a license key

1. In AWS Marketplace, open the flexFS Enterprise Edition listing and choose View purchase options, then Subscribe.

2. After the subscription is created, choose Set up your account. AWS Marketplace opens the flexFS registration page.

3. Enter your organization name and an email address, then choose Get license key.

4. The next page shows your license key and the installation steps. A copy is sent to the email address you entered. Keep the license key private: it identifies your subscription.

To see your license key again, return to the listing in AWS Marketplace (or Manage subscriptions in the AWS Marketplace console) and choose Set up your account. Each subscription has its own license key, and the same key is shown every time for the same subscription.

Caution

The registration link from AWS Marketplace is valid for a short time. If the registration page reports that the link has expired, return to AWS Marketplace and choose Set up your account again. If it reports that the subscription is not active, the subscription has ended, and no license key can be issued for it.

Install flexFS

On the Linux host that will run flexFS, run the Enterprise installer and paste your license key when prompted:

curl -fsSL https://get.flexfs.io/enterprise/install.sh | sudo bash

The rest of the installation is the same as for any Enterprise deployment. See Enterprise: Install for prerequisites and a walkthrough of each prompt.

The installer checks the license key before making any changes. If it reports subscription is not active, the AWS Marketplace subscription for that key has failed or ended.

How usage is billed

AWS bills flexFS usage by the hour in GiB-months of stored data, following the billing model: each file is counted at its logical size, sparse files by allocated blocks only, and hard-linked files once.

Data is billed in four tiers, each with its own price per GiB-month, according to how long ago the data was last used. See how the activity tier is determined for what counts as use.

Tier	Last used
Hot	Less than 180 days ago
Warm	180 to 360 days ago
Cool	360 to 720 days ago
Cold	720 days ago or more

The listing shows the price of each tier. A private offer can set different prices for each tier.

Hourly usage is reported to AWS in whole GiB-months for each tier. Fractions are carried forward to the next hour, so rounding never adds to the bill, and small amounts of storage can show as zero for several hours before a whole unit is reached. A fraction still carried when metering ends is not billed.

AWS infrastructure you run flexFS on, such as EC2 instances, EBS volumes, S3 storage, and data transfer, is billed separately by AWS at your usual rates.

Canceling a subscription

When you cancel the AWS Marketplace subscription, billing stops and flexFS stops issuing license grants. The next time the admin server reports usage statistics, typically within two hours of canceling, it logs:

Warning: subscription is inactive

All volumes then become read-only: existing data can still be read and copied, but nothing can be written.

Resubscribing with an existing installation

A canceled subscription cannot be reactivated. To make an existing installation writable again, subscribe again and switch the admin server to the new subscription’s license key. Volumes, data, mounts, and account and volume tokens are kept.

1. In AWS Marketplace, subscribe and get a license key. The new subscription has a new license key.

2. On the admin server host, replace the license key in the admin server’s credentials file. For the root systemd service that the installer sets up:

   sudo -H /sbin/admin.flexfs init creds --force --token <new license key>

3. Restart the admin server:

   sudo systemctl restart flexfs-admin

4. Confirm that the admin server obtained a license grant for the new key:

   sudo journalctl -u flexfs-admin --since "5 minutes ago" | grep -iE 'grant|subscription'

   The log shows Grant is valid, and volumes become writable again. If it shows Warning: subscription is inactive, check that the new license key was entered and that its subscription is active.

Caution

Do not re-run the installer to change the license key. Overwriting an existing installation permanently deletes the metadata of every volume served from the host.

Next steps

• Enterprise: Install — run the installer
• Billing model — how storage is metered and priced by activity tier
• Admin server — how the license grant is checked and renewed