Some questions about the EE and CE

Hello all,
We are considering to use couchbase as a part of out project , we have some questions about the different editions .
We found the following in the offcial document :
" Use of EE in development and test environments is free. EE requires a paid subscription for production use. "
Our question is how do couchbase determine whether the cluster is using in a prod environment ? In fact we do not need to use the newest features in our environments , we just focus on high-speed access and HA related , so seems the CE edition is more suitable for us ? but what will happen if we use the EE version in our env without a paid license ? will the cluster unavailable after a certain amount of time or some features can not be used ?
Couchbase is just used to store/retrieves session information in our plan , so which edition you suggest us to use ?

Many Thanks.

CE is free and comes with no restrictions on deployment to production. However deploying EE in production is not possible due to licensing restrictions.
thanks

@leozhang,
there is a Legal Agreements – Licenses and Terms of Service
But the answer to the first part of your question (“what is production”) gives Couchbase

“Production Deployment” means a cluster or clusters of Licensed Nodes (together with Licensed Devices, if Couchbase Mobile is licensed) that are being used to support a live workload for an application.

IMHO, ANY environment according to this definition can be treated as “Production Deployment”.
As for the second part of your question (“what could happen if …”), there is only one recommendation: analyze the source or RE binaries :wink: Of course, there could be no “clear and direct answer” like “we can destroy any installation remotely” (and i think, it’s meaningless and too destructive to be true), but two main arguments against “unlicensed usage of EE” are probable legal issues and “out-of-even-forum-support” (you can easily find examples on this forum). Couchbase is a very good product, so, if you project is successful enough, it’s a good idea to buy a paid subscription. Otherwise use CE or src-based builds.
@cihangirb, correct me if i’m wrong