Cloud-based floating licenses and multiple application instances

When implementing cloud-based floating licenses, it's important to consider the case where you allow multiple instances of your application to run on the same device.

If you bind the license to a non-instanced unique identifier, such as a Computer Name, a user could do the following:

• Start instance 1 of your app - this will check-out 1 license.
• Start instance 2 of your app - this will not check-out an additional license.
• Exit instance 1 of your app - this will check-in the license.
• At this point, the customer has instance 2 running without a license.

To prevent this abuse, we recommend picking a computer identifier that is instance-based. We suggest using a combination of a traditional computer identifier such as a Computer Name suffixed with a Process ID. For more details about using a user-defined computer identifier, refer to this article.

Note that the approach above will result in each instance consuming a floating seat.