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Overview of DevPay with Amazon EC2
Paid AMIs
The most popular way to use Amazon EC2 and Amazon DevPay together is by selling an AMI you've created. An AMI that you sell through DevPay is called a paid AMI.
With a paid AMI, your customers:
Must be signed up to use Amazon EC2 themselves
![[Important]](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/docs-common/images/important.png)
Important The process they go through to purchase your AMI product prompts them to sign up for Amazon EC2 if they aren't already signed up. However, to reduce any possible confusion, we encourage you to inform your customers on your site that they must be signed up for Amazon EC2 to purchase your product.
Buy your paid AMI and then launch instances of it
Always use their own AWS credentials when launching instances; you don't launch instances of your paid AMI for them with your credentials
Pay the price you set for the paid AMI, and not the normal Amazon EC2 rates
You can also use Amazon EC2 and Amazon DevPay together with a supported AMI. For more information about supported AMIs, see Supported AMIs.
Current Limitations
With the current implementation of Amazon DevPay:
Your paid or supported AMIs must be backed by Amazon S3. Paid or supported AMIs backed by Amazon Elastic Block Store are currently not supported. Therefore, your paid AMIs cannot run Windows 2008 Server or SQL Server 2008 at this time.
You can't use Elastic Load Balancing (either by itself or in conjunction with Auto Scaling) with instances of paid or supported AMIs.
The discounts from Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances don't apply to paid or supported AMIs. That is, if you purchase Reserved Instances, you don't get the lower usage price associated with them when your customers launch your paid or supported AMIs. Also, if your customers purchase Reserved Instances, and they use your paid or supported AMIs, they continue to pay the price you specified for the use of your paid or supported AMIs.
Your customers can't make Spot Instance requests for your paid or supported AMIs; if they do, Amazon EC2 returns an error.
For more information about any of the preceding Amazon EC2 features, go to the Amazon EC2 product page.
Summary of How Paid AMIs Work
The following figure and table summarize the basic flow for creating and using paid AMIs.
Process for Creating and Using Paid AMIs
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1 |
You create an AMI. The AMI must be Amazon S3-backed and not Amazon EBS-backed. For more information, go to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Developer Guide. |
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2 |
You register your DevPay product with DevPay. As part of this process, you provide a product description, product pricing, etc. This registration process creates an 8-character product code for the product, a product token for the product, and a purchase URL where customers can sign up to use the product. For more information, see Registering Your Product. |
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3 |
You associate the product code with the AMI. This makes the AMI a paid AMI. For instructions, see Associating a Product Code with an AMI. |
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4 |
You share the AMI with select customers or the public. For instructions, see Sharing Your Paid AMI with Select Users or the Public. Note that even though you've shared the AMI, because it's a paid AMI (it has a product code associated with it), no one can use the AMI until they sign up for it (see the following steps). |
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5 |
You make your paid AMI available for sale. To do this, you make the aforementioned purchase URL available. You can advertise your paid AMI in the Solutions Catalog on the AWS Developer Connection site and on the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) page on the AWS Resource Center. |
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6 |
Customers click the purchase URL and sign up for your product. For an example of what the customer sees during the purchase process, see Appendix: The Customer Purchase Experience. 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 also have the credentials needed to launch Amazon EC2 instances. At this point, they have the AMI ID of your paid AMI. |
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7 |
Customers launch instances of your paid AMI. Because you associated the AMI with the product code, you are charged for the Amazon EC2 costs (instance-hours and bandwidth) the customers incur when using instances of that AMI. However, the customers are also charged at the rate you specified during product registration. |
![[Note]](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/docs-common/images/note.png) | Note |
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You can associate your DevPay product code with more than one AMI. However, a single AMI can be associated with only one product code. If you plan to sell multiple AMIs, you could sell them all under a single product code, or different product codes (by registering multiple DevPay products). For information about why you might choose a single product code or multiple product codes, see If You Have Multiple AMIs to Sell. |
Each customer's usage for the paid AMI is displayed on their Application Billing page. For more information, see Where Customers Get Information About Their Bills.
At any time, you can confirm the customer is still currently subscribed to your product. For more information, see Verification of a Customer's Subscription Status.
| Note |
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In the preceding process, you associate your product code with your own AMI and sell the AMI as a DevPay product. There's another scenario for using DevPay with Amazon EC2 in which you sell software or a service to EC2 users and let them associate your product code with their own AMIs. For more information, see Supported AMIs. |
