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flexFS

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

Section titled “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.

Install flexFS

Section titled “Install flexFS”

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

Terminal window
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

Section titled “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.

The listing has a single storage price, for data in the hottest activity tier (tier 0, data used within the last 30 days). Data in colder tiers counts as a fraction of a GiB-month, in proportion to its tier’s rate. For example, if the tier 3 rate is half the tier 0 rate, 1 GiB in tier 3 for a month is billed as 0.5 GiB-months. The rates for each tier are shown in the AWS Marketplace listing.

Hourly usage is reported to AWS in whole GiB-months. 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

Section titled “Canceling a subscription”

When you cancel the AWS Marketplace subscription, billing stops and flexFS stops renewing its license grant. The admin server logs:

Warning: subscription is not active: volumes become read-only when the grant expires at <time>

Volumes stay fully usable until the current grant expires, about 7 days later. After that, all volumes become read-only: existing data can still be read and copied, but nothing can be written. To restore read-write access, subscribe again and choose Set up your account. The new subscription has a new license key. Switch the admin server’s credentials to the new key and restart the server. For the root systemd service that the installer sets up:

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

Existing volumes and data are unaffected. The admin server obtains a new license grant for the new key, and volumes become writable again.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”