Licensing ​

Yellowbrick software licensing varies by platform. For more information on supported platforms, see the platform support guide. The details are as follows:

Community Edition (CE)

The software is free. You don't need to install a software license to use it.

Enterprise Edition (EE) on appliances

The software is licensed together with the appliance hardware, according to contractual terms agreed upon during purchasing. You don't need to install a software license to use it.

Enterprise Edition (EE) on cloud platforms

The software requires a software license in order to activate. You'll need to acquire and install one. See information on software licensing below.

About Software Licenses ​

Software licenses are issued by Yellowbrick Data. Licenses are tied to a cloud account/subscription/project (choose your terminology depending on your cloud provider) and a given region and instance. Broadly, there are two classes of licenses: Trial licenses and full licenses, described below.

Licenses are delivered via email in a scrambled text form; to activate the license, cut and paste the text into Yellowbrick Manager's licensing page by navigating to Instance Management → Instance Management → License.

An unlicensed Yellowbrick installation can't create computer clusters, severely limiting its utility by making it unable to execute most kinds of SQL queries. You can still log in, poke around and run some very simple SQL queries that don't involve computation on stored data, but that's about it.

Trial licenses ​

Trial licenses can be requested for an instance via Yellowbrick Manager or, if you prefer, by contacting us at licensing@yellowbrick.com. Automatically issued trial licenses are currently valid for 30 days and cover up to 128 vCPUs; if you'd like a longer term, assistance from one of our engineers in a PoC, or to run clusters with more vCPUs, please contact us via email at licensing@yellowbrick.com.

To request a trial license in Yellowbrick Manager, navigate to Instance Management → Instance Management → License. Instance Management is the cube icon in the leftmost pane. The trial license will be delivered by email in a couple of minutes. Remember to check your Junk/Spam folder.

Full licenses ​

A trial license can be replaced by a full license. To request a full license, please contact us at licensing@yellowbrick.com. A full license will require you to commit to on-demand pricing, a subscription or another class of commercial agreement. Full licenses typically don't contain vCPU limits.

Technical Implementation ​

The scrambled license text that you paste into Yellowbrick Manager is actually a Base64URL encoded JSON Web Token (JWT). You can decode the JWT and look inside its contents, if you're interested, by pasting the text into jwt.io.

The license includes the following key fields:

Trial

Whether or not the license is a trial license. A new trial license can't be installed when one has already been installed. If you need to extend your trial, please reach out and contact us via email at licensing@yellowbrick.com.

Soft expiry date

The date at which Yellowbrick Manager will start to warn you the license is about to expire. After this date, operation of the instance will not be restricted in any way.

Hard expiry date

The date at which the instance will become unlicensed. After this date, running compute clusters will be suspended, and you won't be able to start new ones.

vCPU limit

An optional limit on the maximum number of vCPUs that can be used. For paid enterprise licenses, this is typically unlimited.

Contact information

Contact details for your business or organization, in case we at Yellowbrick need to get in touch.

This JWT is also used as the authentication token for instances to automatically report metering data when enabled in Yellowbrick Manager.