Explanation
Licensing & activation
Workbench runs in your infrastructure, often without internet access, and must never depend on a call to Elevarq to keep working. The licensing design follows from that constraint: everything is verified locally, entitlements degrade gracefully, and the install proves its identity rather than phoning home.
Local verification, no phone-home
Your license is a signed artefact. Workbench verifies its signature locally, against a key ring embedded in the image — so activation and the periodic refresh are file operations, not network calls. An air-gapped install is a first-class case, not a workaround.
Graceful degradation
Entitlements gate features, not the whole product. A not-yet-activated install still runs — you can deploy first and activate later, and paid capabilities light up without a restart. As a license nears its re-attestation deadline Workbench surfaces a warning long before anything stops; only a genuinely expired, rejected, or revoked license withdraws the gated features. The principle is that the core keeps running and the operator always has a clear, early signal.
Online and offline activation
Two paths, same trust model:
- Online — you upload the activated license file Elevarq sent you; Workbench verifies and persists it. No outbound call is needed.
- Offline — for air-gapped sites, the install exports an activation requestcarrying its public identity; you upload it to the Elevarq portal, which counter-signs it (enforcing your license's instance limit), and you import the activation file you download back. A periodic re-attestation repeats that exchange to keep the activation current.
The how-to guides walk both: activate your license and activate offline.
One process per license
A license authorises a single running install — bound to that deployment's persistent identity. This keeps licensing honest without a central server adjudicating it: a second replica, or a cloned identity volume, is detected and fails closed at re-attestation rather than silently doubling capacity. It is also why the Helm chart pins a single replica and the Recreate strategy. If you need horizontal scale, you license one install per Workbench — each carries its own identity.
The master key is separate
Licensing identity and at-rest encryption are distinct concerns. The master key that encrypts your stored credentials is yours, lives in your secret manager, and is never part of the license. The safety model covers its custody — the short version is back it up outside the data volume, because nothing can recover the data without it.