Summary of How Supported AMIs Work
The following steps summarize the basic process for supported AMIs:
Supported AMI Process
| 1 | You register a product with Amazon DevPay. As part of this process, you provide a product description, product pricing, etc. This registration process creates a product code for the product and a URL where customers can sign up to use the product (called the purchase URL). |
| 2 | You then advertise your paid AMI to customers and make the purchase URL available to them. |
| 3 | Customers who want to use your product discover the product through your advertisements, etc. |
| 4 | Customer then use the purchase URL to sign up for and purchase your product. If they're not already signed up for Amazon EC2, they'll be prompted to sign up. They purchase your product with their Amazon.com accounts. They must have the credentials needed to launch Amazon EC2 instances. At this point, they have the product code (from either step 2 or step 3 above). |
| 5 | Customers than use an Amazon EC2 command or API call to associate the product code with their AMIs. |
| 6 | Customers then launch one or more instances of the AMIs. Because the customers associated their AMIs with the product code, they are charged at the rate you set. |
Each customer's bill for the AMI is displayed on their Application Billing page, which shows the activity for DevPay products. For more information, see the Amazon DevPay Developer Guide.
When a customer contacts you for support for an AMI, you can confirm your product code is associated with the AMI and the customer's instance is currently running the AMI (see Confirming an Instance Is Running an AMI Associated with a Product Code).