Supported AMIs

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: 2009-03-01

previous page next page

Supported AMIs

Supported AMIs are different from paid AMIs. With a supported AMI, you charge for software or a service you provide that customers use with their own AMIs.

The main difference between a paid AMI and a supported AMI is how the AMI is associated with a product code:

  • Paid AMI—You associate your own product code with your own AMI

  • Supported AMI—Other EC2 users associate your product code with their own AMIs

[Important] Important

If your customers purchase Reserved Instances, they don't get the Reserved Instance price discount with supported AMIs. That is, if they associate your product code with their AMIs, they don't get the lower price associated with their Reserved Instances when they launch those AMIs. They always pay the price that you specified for your DevPay product. For more information about Reserved Instances, see Reserving Amazon EC2 Instances for Long-Term Use.

The following figure and table summarizes the flow for creating and using supported AMIs.

Process for Supported AMIs

Supported AMI Process

1

You register a product with Amazon DevPay.

For more information, see Product Registration. 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 make your product available for sale.

3

Customers 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 step 2).
4

Customers then use an Amazon EC2 command or API call to associate the product code with their AMIs.

For more information, see Associating a Product Code with an AMI.
5

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.
[Note] Note

Amazon EC2 prevents your customers (but not you as the product code owner) from associating your product code with AMI types the product isn't configured for. For example, if the product is configured only for Linux/UNIX AMIs, your customers can't associate the product code with Windows AMIs. Also, Amazon EC2 prevents your customers from launching specific instance types your product isn't configured for. For more information about product configuration, go to Your Product's Configuration and Price in the Amazon DevPay Developer Guide.

Each customer's bill for the AMI is displayed on their Application Billing page, which shows the activity for DevPay products. For more information, refer to 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. For more information, see Confirming an Instance Is Running an AMI Associated with a Product Code.

previous page start next page