Skip to content
Identity and Access Management

Device Licensing

Challenge

Once a device is deployed and operational in the field, updates to its licensing status such as license activation, modification, or expiration are critical to its functionality. The core challenge is ensuring these devices receive timely, real-time license updates without requiring manual intervention. Examples of costly and slow manual intervention include a device reboot or a field engineer logging into the device to manually publish license files. A delay in receiving updated license information, or the reliance on manual steps, leads to unnecessary operational friction, impacts feature compliance, and degrades the customer experience.

Solution

The proposed solution is to leverage the robust device connectivity established through the device-id-cert-tools provisioning framework to deliver license notifications in real-time. By utilizing the existing cloud messaging infrastructure (IoT/MQTT), any device that has been provisioned and is cloud-connected through the central tool will automatically subscribe to license event topics.

This solution ensures:

  • Real-Time Updates: Devices receive license changes instantly, ensuring features and compliance are always up-to-date.
  • Elimination of Manual Intervention: License updates are pushed automatically to the device, removing the need for reboots or field service visits to update files.
  • Maximum Business Value: Every device enabled via device-id-cert-tools gains this critical, real-time capability.

Platform Topics for Real-Time Notification:

To support this push mechanism, the following platform topics will be used:

  • AWS: $aws/thing/{deviceId}/shadow/name/platform-license-notification
  • Azure: devices/{device_id}/messages/devicebound?platform-event=license-notification

Workflow

  1. Customer purchases license through Virtual Warehouse / Dealer Portal / Admin Console
  2. License assignment is done in EMS for the device
  3. EMS/TLS events are generated for license assignment and revocation
  4. Event listener process for license events and publishes shadow(AWS) or outbound(Azure) requests to IoT
  5. IoT processes shadow/outbound requests and sends to IoT broker (platform topics)
  6. Devices subscribed to platform topics shall receive updates via MQTT / HTTP

Use cases

  • New Feature Activation: A customer purchases an upgrade and the device instantly activates the corresponding software module without manual intervention.
  • License revocation: A subscription is revoked and the device receives a notification, allowing it to gracefully disable the licensed feature.