Inflectra Cloud Services Fair Use Policy

Overview

Inflectra cloud services (cloud hosted SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, and KronoDesk), as is standard for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions use multi-tenancy to reduce costs and improve performance. This means that, for most customers the hardware their application is running on is also running that of other customers. All data and activity for one customer is completely separate from all other customers on the same hardware. However, this design leaves users vulnerable to performance issues and even outages when other users of their shared resources have spikes in their consumption. 

To help ensure all customers have a consistent experience all of the time, Inflectra limits the resources individuals can consume and the amount of requests they can make to certain commands. When these limits are exceeded, requests may be either delayed or blocked. If an individual continuously exceeds our fair use limits, we will contact them by email.

API Usage

Unlike some other products and platforms, we do not explicitly rate limit the API calls. Some other products may limit API request to X per minute (for example). However we believe that customers want the flexibility of using our APIs the way they need, so we do not have similar hard-limits. That being said, should we get a very large spike of usage that could impact the usage of the system for other customers, we may apply a temporary rate limit.

As an example, users accessing our externally facing API may have their activity throttled during periods of high overall CPU utilization, if they call the API at very high volumes over a sustained period of time.

Storage Usage

Similarly, we do not have a fixed storage limit for our cloud customers, they can generally create as much data in the system as they like. However if we find that users are using a disproportionate level of storage resources as compared to their license tier, we may require (at our discretion) the customer to purchase a higher license tier or reduce their storage.

For example, a 10 concurrent users customer subscription has 80 GB of storage, but then over time expands to 4TB, we will require them to purchase a license tier that covers the cost of the storage, in this case a 50 concurrent user license.