My real, pointed question is: what was the opportunity cost of cattelizing that vs any of the other work you could have done in that time? Because given a fresh instance but I'm allowed to use the rest of my infra, setting that machine back up in the morning should just be to instantiating the right docker container on the host and copying the license file in. Depending on what the vendor software does, I probably still wouldn't ASG that until it had actually happened more often than once a month - there are so many more things to stress about! Even if this were the splunk license checker, losing some log files would be quite disappointing but not the absolute end of the world - if you're losing api calls to stripe or the equivalent that's a different matter!