I deployed the ECK Operator (v1.0.1) along with elasticsearch (7.6.0) and kibana (7.6.0) in my GKE cluster. The operator is in the elastic-system namespace, while elasticsearch and kibana are in the security namespace. I followed the instructions here to create a trial license. After creating the trial license secret, the ECK operator applied this annotation to the secret: license.k8s.elastic.co/invalid: trial can be started only once. We had never started a trial, so we got an actual trial license from a member of the elastic team.
With the license in json format, I deleted the old trial license secret and created a new one following [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud-on-k8s/master/k8s-licensing.html#k8s_start_a_trial](http://this documentation). The ECK operator logs were reporting that the signature was invalid for this license. I then used the Kibana Dev tools to successfully update the license, but after a few hours the Basic license had returned. I updated the license again the same way and again it was revoked a few hours later. This has happened several times now, whether or not the license kubernetes secret is present.