Creating AMI-based products
The Amazon Machine Image (AMI) self-service experience guides you as you create your product listing and make change requests. By using the self-service experience, you can update your product listing directly with less time needed for processing by the AWS Marketplace Seller Operations team. Many steps of the self-service experience align with the catalog system in AWS Marketplace, which facilitates direct validation instead of waiting for processing and validation from the AWS Marketplace Seller Operations team. This topic explains how to use the AMI self-service experience to create a product listing for a single AMI. Customers use AMIs to create Amazon EC2 instances with your product already installed and configured.
Prerequisites
Before you create an AMI product listing, you must complete the following prerequisites:
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Have access to the AWS Marketplace Management Portal. This is the tool that you use to register as a seller and manage the products that you sell on AWS Marketplace. To learn more about getting access to the AWS Marketplace Management Portal, see Policies and permissions for AWS Marketplace sellers.
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Register as a seller and, if you want to charge for your products, submit your tax and banking information. To learn more about becoming a seller, see Getting started as an AWS Marketplace seller.
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Have a product that you want to sell. For AMI-based products, this typically means you have created or modified your server software, and created an AMI for your customers to use. To learn more about preparing an AMI for use in AWS Marketplace, see Best practices for building AMIs for use with AWS Marketplace.
Understand the self-service experience
The self-service experience guides you through creating your product on AWS Marketplace. As you proceed through the steps, you specify product information and AMI deployment settings, such as AWS Region, instance types, and AMI details. You also configure transaction details including the pricing, country availability, EULA, and refund policy. As an option, you can specify an allowlist of AWS account IDs to access and test the product while it is in the Limited status.
Before you start, review the following key aspects of the self-service experience:
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You can only go to the next step after you complete the required fields in the current step. This requirement is because there is page-level validation at the end of each step. You can't save or submit an incomplete step.
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If you need to end your session before completing all the steps in the process, you can choose Save and exit to submit the steps that you completed to the staging area.
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A step that is incomplete and doesn't pass validation isn't submitted to the system. A partially completed step isn't valid and can't be saved.
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When you choose Save and exit, the Save and exit dialog box shows the steps that passed validation checks. You can review and choose to save up to the last completed and validated steps. If there is a validation error or missing details, you can choose Fix it to go back to that step.
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After you Save and exit, the request is under review while it's processing. It could take a few minutes or hours to finish processing. You can't continue the steps or make changes until the request has succeeded. For the first Save and exit, the request is creating the product in parallel with the steps that you have completed.
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After the request has Succeeded, you have completed the save. To resume changes on the Product overview page, choose Resume product creation or use Request changes to update the details you have previously submitted in the last session. When you resume, notice that the steps you have completed are marked with a green Succeeded label. To update a previously submitted step, use Request changes. The previous Save and exit request must be completed before you can continue this step.
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When you’ve completed all the steps, you can choose Next to see a review. Choose Submit which requests that the system perform a final validation. After you receive a Succeeded response, the product moves to a Limited status. You can see on the detail page that the product is now available to anyone on the allowlist. If the request fails, the product remains in the Staging status and requires you to make corrections before resubmitting.
Create the listing
The steps in this section explain how to create a listing for a single-AMI product.
Note
You can only go to the next step when you complete the required fields in the current step. You can't save or submit an incomplete step. If you need to end your session before completing all the steps in the process, choose Save and exit to submit the steps that you completed to the staging area. For more information, see Understand the self-service experience.
To create a single-AMI product
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Open the AWS Marketplace Management Portal at https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/management/tour/
, and then sign in to your seller account. -
From the Products menu, choose Server. Or, you can go directly to the Server Products
page. -
From the Server products tab, select Create server product, select Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and then select one of the licensing types for single-AMI products:
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Bring your own license (BYOL) – A product that the user gets a license from you outside of AWS Marketplace. It can be either a paid or free license.
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Free – A product that is free for your subscribers to use. (They will still pay charges for any associated Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, or other AWS resources.)
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Paid hourly or hourly-annual – A product that the buyer pays for either on an hourly basis or hourly with an annual contract. AWS does the metering based on the product code on the AMI.
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Paid monthly – A product that the buyer is billed for monthly by AWS.
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Paid usage – Software is directly charged for the value you provide, along with one of four usage categories: users, data, bandwidth, or hosts. You can define up to 24 dimensions for the product. All charges are still incurred by the customer.
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AMI with contract pricing – A Single-AMI product or Single-AMI with an AWS CloudFormation stack that the buyer pays an upfront fee for.
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The self-service experience guides you through the steps to create an AWS Marketplace listing. You must enter product information (metadata), product deployment details (AWS Region, instances, and AMI details), and public offer details (price, EULA, availability by country, EULA, refund). As an option, you can add accounts to the allowlist to test the product. Complete each step to move to the next step in the process.
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If you need to end your session before completing all steps in the process, you can use the Save and exit function to submit the steps you completed to the staging area. This creates a request for the information you provided to be validated. While the request is processing, you can't edit the product. After the request succeeds, you can continue creating your product by choosing Resume product creation.
A failed request means no update was made to the product because of a validation error. This will be visible on the request log for your product. You can select the request to view the error, use Copy to new under Actions to correct the error, and resubmit the request. When you resume the steps, you can continue from the step after the step that you saved in the last session. To update previous steps, go to the product overview page and submit a change request to update steps that you submitted previously.
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After entering required information for all of the change request steps, choose Submit. This submittal creates a request to the AWS Marketplace catalog system to validate the information and release the product to a Limited state, if the validation passes. While the request is processing, you can't continue to edit the product. After the request succeeds, the product is moved to a Limited state.
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When your product is initially published, it's only accessible to your AWS account (the one you used to create the product) and the AWS Marketplace Seller Operations team's test account. If you view the product from the Server products page, you can choose View on AWS Marketplace to view the product details as they will appear in AWS Marketplace for buyers. This detail listing isn't visible to other AWS Marketplace users.
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This capability allows you to test your product (and even publish multiple versions for testing) before releasing it publicly.
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Test your product in the Limited state and make sure that it follows AWS Marketplace AMI-based product requirements and the product checklist. Then, to request that your product be published to Public, choose Update visibility. The AWS Marketplace Seller Operations team must review your product before approving it to go Public.
Note
Product verification and publication is a manual process, which is handled by the AWS Marketplace Seller Operations team. It can take 7–10 business days to publish your initial product version, if there are no errors. For more details about timing, see Timing and expectations.
For more information about preparing and submitting both your single-AMI product and your product information, see Additional resources.
Additional resources
For more information about preparing your product information and submitting it for publication, see the following resources:
For more information about preparing your single-AMI product for submission to AWS Marketplace, see the following resources:
