Clarification on Trial Mode License Behavior in Non-Production Environments

[Rahul21199]

Duende IdentityServer- 7.8.3
.NET Framework - 10

We are a licensed Duende IdentityServer customer (Enterprise Edition license). In our non-production environments, we run IdentityServer in trial mode (no license key configured) with 50+ clients.

We are seeing intermittent error logs related to trial mode limits:

Error 1 — Issuer limit:
You are using IdentityServer in trial mode and have processed requests for 13 issuers.

Error 2 — Client limit:
You are using IdentityServer in trial mode and have processed requests for 15 clients.
In production, this will require a license with sufficient client capacity...

Observations:

• The count varies between occurrences (e.g., 15 clients one time, 20 clients another)
• Error appear intermittently, not continuously
• All 50+ clients correctly despite the error(no one reported any issues so far)

Questions:

1. Does production license permit use in non-production environments (dev/test/UAT)? If so, what is the recommended configuration approach?

2. If license covers non-prod usage, is configuring the production license key in non-prod the recommended approach, or
   is there a separate development/test license key available?

[maartenba]

@Rahul21199 good questions!

1. Yes, production license can be used in your non-production environments.
2. We do not consider the key a secret, configuring the same key is absolutely fine.

Some more background: https://docs.duendesoftware.com/general/licensing/#trial-mode

[Rahul21199]

Thank you for confirming. Two follow-up questions:

1. Any drawbacks of using the production license key in non-production?

Are there any implications we should be aware of, such as:

• Client/issuer counts from non-prod being aggregated with production counts against our licensed limits(seems Enterprise Edition have no limit)?
• Any risk of the license key being invalidated or flagged if it's seen across multiple environments/instances?

2. Why are these errors intermittent?

We have 40+ clients and 13+ issuers configured and active at all times, yet we only see these errors occasionally

[maartenba]

No drawbacks, the checks are all done locally (no phoning home) and there is no risk of these clashing.

As for how they are intermittent: some checks are done at startup (license validity, key management, ...), while others are done at runtime (e.g. when a client is first used). We also have some throttling to not pollute logs, which leads to the behaviour you are seeing.