We Don'T Need No Licensing Server

Cloudification of edge to core infrastructure has led to new and rich application and service deployment and operational models. These ecosystems have complex relationships between the application vendors, infrastructure operators and application users. Traditional licensing and compliance enforcement methods such as those based on in person audits and dynamic issuing of license keys inhibit the resource pro-visioning and consumption flexibility offered by cloudified services due to scalability and management overheads. In this work, we argue the need for a trusted framework for application usage rights compliance. This new architecture named "Metered Boot" provides a way to realize trusted, capacity/usage based rights compliance for service deployments that allows decoupling of usage rights governed by application vendors from the resource provisioning by the infrastructure provider. We have built a Metered Boot prototype for a particular usecase of NFV usage rights compliance.