My work environment is Amazon Web Services (AWS). It has been awhile but I have used Manifold in the past and am interested in looking at it again. On AWS this means either running on EC2 with or without GPU support or similarly on Amazon Workspaces. I looked at the install and activation doc pages but there is no specific mention of running on any cloud VM from what I can see. What I am mostly concerned about is activating Manifold on an EC2 instance, then stopping it, then starting it again, which may or may not break activation. That start/stop/start again is feature of using EC2 that is particularly important because it allows me to modify my underlying hardware as a function of what I am working on. Can someone point me at any documentation about running on AWS? Is there a way to test this before buying a new license?

Some links, and then a discussion...

From the System Requirements web page: "True PC compatible hardware, running on the actual physical machine"

and

"Manifold products are not supported for use in Macintosh or any other non-native PC environment using Windows emulators. Some users report successful use with emulators on Mac, but that is not offically supported. Manifold products are only supported in true PC compatibles with direct access to the PC hardware not mediated by middleware such as virtual machines, emulators, remote consoles, timesharing console servers, attempts to allow "floating" use of Manifold installed on one machine to be used by a variety of client machines and the like.".

From the Installations user manual topic: "Manifold products are produced and licensed for true PC compatible hardware, running on the actual physical machine, and are not supported for PC emulators or virtual machines or other software which claims to mimic a real PC. "

The main issue I think with stuff like EC2 is the opacity of what physically is being done. Only Amazon knows, so there's no way to tell if licensing mechanisms (or even true compatibility) will or will not break either now or at some surprising moment in the future. That's why Manifold doesn't support such things.

If you have a physical machine you can stop it and start it all you like and that, of course, isn't going to mess up activation. You can modify the hardware in a reasonable way, like adding or reducing RAM, adding or removing GPU cards and activation still holds. You can even change hardware to what is, in effect, a new machine (swapping CPUs or motherboards, for example) and use up one of your activations, which will grow back. Heck, you could get a new machine what, four times a year? and re-activate and be good to go, with your oldest activation growing back in time so you could keep that rolling schedule of hardware upgrades forever.

If Amazon guarantees to you that they're licensing to you exactly the same "machine" except for minor changes like RAM amounts or GPU, you should be good to go. But if they implement that by switching to a different "machine" then you'll use up an activation to switch to the new "machine." Same with stops/starts. If every time they stop and start an instance you end up on a new "machine" you'll need a new activation.

Those are questions only Amazon can answer since only they know how they provision their services. In such cases it's usually easier to just try a license and see what happens. That has a cost risk to it (as well as a risk how Amazon provisions in the future may change), but you could easily spend much more cost in time trying to hunt down an authoritative response from Amazon.

If you track down anybody at Amazon interested in trying anything out, Manifold has always been happy to work with such vendors, providing them with free licenses and such.

Dimitri, Thanks for the very detailed response. Until last May I would have been the person at Amazon Web Services(AWS) interested in running Manifold. I would have been the authoritative response from AWS. Let's just say I've done similar work in regards to testing for other GIS vendors in the past. I am now at Taylor Geospatial Institute which amongst other things supports a consortium of academic and research organizations.

Yes, unless you deploy a bare metal instance on EC2 there is no guarantee you get the same machine at start/stop. The bare metal option basically means the host instance in that type of EC2 which generally means its a lot more than you will need other than for some very specialized server class use-cases. The fact that when you start your instance and your VM runs on some other underlying host is really the core feature of EC2. However, as long as you stay in the same EC2 type, the only things that will change are vCPU, GPU count and memory. EC2 does not use standard PC Bios or UEFI and the x86 types run custom Intel and AMD CPUs not available on standard PCs. Plus hardware access, block storage, network is virtualized with the AWS Nitro system. So, yes calling EC2 a "standard PC" is very much a stretch.

The reason I am interested in running Manifold on EC2 has 2 sides to it. The most important is that the data is in the Cloud. 100s of PBs of geospatial data. Both open and commercial. More specifically it is typically a Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF(COG) in Amazon S3. Similarly for LiDAR. It is not efficient for me to download it especially when there is so much computational power on EC2 right next to the data that I don't have to buy, just rent. The kind of computational power that Manifold is good at exploiting.

I will think about just buying and giving Manifold a try. It if works great. If not, I think there is very compelling case for some other way to authorize Manifold running on EC2. I can tell you there are many potential users of Manifold that are looking for more performant options to work with all of that data on AWS, Azure, GCP etc.

Given what you say I feel almost certain the stop/start will result in a new activation required, so I wouldn't spend the money on a test unless you could use the license otherwise. If you still have contacts at Amazon have one of them contact Manifold for a free test license so they can do it on their time.

If not, I think there is very compelling case for some other way to authorize Manifold running on EC2.

I agree. A rental model, with licenses authenticating on the fly based on fairly granular contacts with Manifold's servers would be one way to do that. But even better I think would be to remove Manifold, which from an EC2 perspective is a third party, from the show and run everything within Amazon's control so there is no need for any contacts with non-Amazon servers. That would require a deal with Amazon.