Cross-account Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host sharing

Dedicated Host sharing enables Dedicated Host owners to share their Dedicated Hosts with other AWS accounts or within an AWS organization. This enables you to create and manage Dedicated Hosts centrally, and share the Dedicated Host across multiple AWS accounts or within your AWS organization.

In this model, the AWS account that owns the Dedicated Host (owner) shares it with other AWS accounts (consumers). Consumers can launch instances onto Dedicated Hosts that are shared with them in the same way that they would launch instances onto Dedicated Hosts that they allocate in their own account. The owner is responsible for managing the Dedicated Host and the instances that they launch onto it. Owners can't modify instances that consumers launch onto shared Dedicated Hosts. Consumers are responsible for managing the instances that they launch onto Dedicated Hosts shared with them. Consumers can't view or modify instances owned by other consumers or by the Dedicated Host owner, and they can't modify Dedicated Hosts that are shared with them.

A Dedicated Host owner can share a Dedicated Host with:

• Specific AWS accounts inside or outside of its AWS organization

• An organizational unit inside its AWS organization

• Its entire AWS organization

Contents

• Prerequisites for sharing Dedicated Hosts
• Limitations for sharing Dedicated Hosts
• Related services
• Share across Availability Zones
• Shared Dedicated Host permissions
• Billing and metering
• Dedicated Host limits
• Host recovery and Dedicated Host sharing
• Share a Dedicated Host
• Unshare a Dedicated Host
• View shared Dedicated Hosts

Prerequisites for sharing Dedicated Hosts

• To share a Dedicated Host, you must own it in your AWS account. You can't share a Dedicated Host that has been shared with you.

• To share a Dedicated Host with your AWS organization or an organizational unit in your AWS organization, you must enable sharing with AWS Organizations. For more information, see Enable Sharing with AWS Organizations in the AWS RAM User Guide.

Limitations for sharing Dedicated Hosts

You can't share Dedicated Hosts that have been allocated for the following instance types: u-6tb1.metal, u-9tb1.metal, u-12tb1.metal, u-18tb1.metal, and u-24tb1.metal.

Related services

AWS Resource Access Manager

Dedicated Host sharing integrates with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM). AWS RAM is a service that enables you to share your AWS resources with any AWS account or through AWS Organizations. With AWS RAM, you share resources that you own by creating a resource share. A resource share specifies the resources to share, and the consumers with whom to share them. Consumers can be individual AWS accounts, or organizational units or an entire organization from AWS Organizations.

For more information about AWS RAM, see the AWS RAM User Guide.

Share across Availability Zones

To ensure that resources are distributed across the Availability Zones for a Region, we independently map Availability Zones to names for each account. This could lead to Availability Zone naming differences across accounts. For example, the Availability Zone us-east-1a for your AWS account might not have the same location as us-east-1a for another AWS account.

To identify the location of your Dedicated Hosts relative to your accounts, you must use the Availability Zone ID (AZ ID). The Availability Zone ID is a unique and consistent identifier for an Availability Zone across all AWS accounts. For example, use1-az1 is an Availability Zone ID for the us-east-1 Region and it is the same location in every AWS account.

To view the Availability Zone IDs for the Availability Zones in your account

1. Open the AWS RAM console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ram.

2. The Availability Zone IDs for the current Region are displayed in the Your AZ ID panel on the right-hand side of the screen.

Shared Dedicated Host permissions

Permissions for owners

Owners are responsible for managing their shared Dedicated Hosts and the instances that they launch onto them. Owners can view all instances running on the shared Dedicated Host, including those launched by consumers. However, owners can't take any action on running instances that were launched by consumers.

Permissions for consumers

Consumers are responsible for managing the instances that they launch onto a shared Dedicated Host. Consumers can't modify the shared Dedicated Host in any way, and they can't view or modify instances that were launched by other consumers or the Dedicated Host owner.

Billing and metering

There are no additional charges for sharing Dedicated Hosts.

Owners are billed for Dedicated Hosts that they share. Consumers are not billed for instances that they launch onto shared Dedicated Hosts.

Dedicated Host Reservations continue to provide billing discounts for shared Dedicated Hosts. Only Dedicated Host owners can purchase Dedicated Host Reservations for shared Dedicated Hosts that they own.

Dedicated Host limits

Shared Dedicated Hosts count towards the owner's Dedicated Hosts limits only. Consumer's Dedicated Hosts limits are not affected by Dedicated Hosts that have been shared with them. Similarly, instances that consumers launch onto shared Dedicated Hosts do not count towards their instance limits.

Host recovery and Dedicated Host sharing

Host recovery recovers instances launched by the Dedicated Host owner and the consumers with whom it has been shared. The replacement Dedicated Host is allocated to the owner's account. It is added to the same resource shares as the original Dedicated Host, and it is shared with the same consumers.

For more information, see Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host recovery.