Licensing

Some important FileMaker Cloud licensing information is below.

• FileMaker Cloud HAS to be annual licenses, whether it is FileMaker Licensing for Teams (FLT), Volume Licenses, or a Site License. If you have perpetual licenses and are interested in FileMaker Cloud, contact us to discuss converting to FileMaker Annual licensing. If you have an Annual Volume License (AVLA), you must have at least 5 connections for it to work on FileMaker Cloud.

• There are two ways to license FileMaker Cloud: directly through AWS or via Bring Your Own License (BYOL).

• The first way is to buy directly through the AWS Marketplace. The perk of going through the AWS Marketplace is that hourly options are available, instead of just annual. However, the hourly options are 975% more expensive than annual licenses and are typically used for rare occasions, such as seasonal use or to further test a solution. To save money by purchasing hourly, you would have to use your FileMaker Cloud instance less than 37 days a year.

• Purchasing FileMaker Cloud licenses directly through AWS limits you to four license types: Annual FileMaker Licensing for Teams (AFLT) with 5, 10, 25, or 100 users.

• If one of the four available license types doesn't suit your needs, you definitely want to utilize the Bring Your Own License (BYOL) option. Contact us to discuss getting you the best license for your FileMaker Cloud instance.

Benefits of FileMaker Cloud

Fast Setup

As previously stated, arguably the best part of FileMaker Cloud is that you can have it up and running in about 30 minutes! Compare that to when you purchase your own dedicated machine to be used internally, where you have to purchase the machine online or in a store, wait for it to be shipped, then go through the process of setting up the software, hardware, and network, which can take days!

Reduced Maintenance

Even after the initial setup described above, when you have your own dedicated server, there is still more time required to ensure everything is running optimally. The main time savings with FileMaker Cloud are in the updates and monitoring of OS and FileMaker Server updates. Having an internal system requires you to check in to ensure the OS is up to date, as Windows releases patches at least once a month, if not more. With FileMaker Cloud, this is all done automatically.

Security and Peace of Mind

Something everyone worries about these days is security, given all the data breaches you hear about in the news. With FileMaker Cloud, security is made easy. For starters, AWS is responsible for the physical security of the server hardware and the energy costs of running a data center; this means you don’t have to worry about someone breaking into your office and taking all your data. FileMaker Cloud also comes with an SSL certificate as part of the initial setup. This feature would need to be done manually on your own dedicated FileMaker Server machine otherwise.

Additionally, FileMaker Cloud comes with automatic backups that happen every 20 minutes and is stored for one week. Of course, with your own dedicated machine, you can customize this, but FileMaker Cloud comes preset and is part of the easy setup in 30 minutes or less.

Unsupported Features in FileMaker Cloud

With all this awesomeness, why wouldn’t I want to use FileMaker Cloud!? One might ask. There are really only a handful of scenarios in which FileMaker Cloud may not be a good fit for you and your organization.

• Custom Web Publishing with PHP and XML – If you are, or want to integrate with your website, for instance, FileMaker Cloud does not support PHP or XML.

• Plugin Support - If you are using any plugins in your application, you'll need to ensure they have a new version that supports Linux on FileMaker Cloud.

• External Authentication – FileMaker Cloud does not support external authentication via Active Directory/Open Directory. It does, however, support custom app authentication via FileMaker user accounts and now OAuth 2.0 with Amazon, Google, or Microsoft Azure AD. Learn more about it in our FileMaker Cloud 16 overview.

• Server Side Scripts – FileMaker Cloud now allows for server-side scripts to run, available via the FileMaker Admin API as of v1.16 on October 25th, 2017. Download our free FileMaker Cloud Schedule Manager to set up and manage your FileMaker Cloud Server Side Scripts.

Moving to FileMaker Cloud

After reading this and learning more about FileMaker Cloud, you may see it as a great fit for your organization and saving you time and money compared to managing your in-house server. However, there are additional items to keep in mind beyond the unsupported features listed above.

The main point is optimizing how your application(s) are built. Having a FileMaker Server on your Local Area Network (LAN) will give you much better speed than anything traveling across the Wide Area Network (WAN). You may need to go through a series of steps to optimize your application(s) before moving them to a cloud server, or your experience may be drastically different. With this being said, if all or most of your employees are in one location where the current in-house server is located, it will likely be best to keep it in-house. You can't beat the latency and speed of accessing a database on your LAN versus traveling back and forth across the internet on the WAN.

FileMaker recognizes that customers with an existing in-house server will need to test FileMaker Cloud to determine whether it is a good fit for them, so they are offering a 30-day grace period to migrate from FileMaker Server. If you have questions or would like us to review, contact us for a free technical analysis to help optimize your application(s) before moving to FileMaker Cloud.

Conclusion

FileMaker Cloud is fast and easy to set up, and it scales with minimal effort. There are many reasons FileMaker Cloud would be a great fit for you and your organization, from the minimal impact on IT staff during updates and deployments to the benefits of AWS, which handles security and scalability. FileMaker Cloud is a huge benefit and a welcome addition to the FileMaker Family.

Note about freeing up license keys

I tested setting up FileMaker Cloud before the recorded demo and, in turn, needed to free the license key to use it again. I terminated the server instance, thinking this would release the server license key. In doing so, I received an Error 3030 "License Key has already been used for FileMaker Cloud" when trying to enter the license key for a new instance. I found that you have to deactivate the license key in the Server Admin Console before terminating an instance to free it up. If this happens to you, you will need to call FileMaker Support and have them manually release the license key for your new instance.