Container product billing, metering, and licensing integrations - AWS Marketplace
Hourly and custom metering with AWS Marketplace Metering ServiceContract pricing with AWS License Manager

Container product billing, metering, and licensing integrations

AWS Marketplace integrates with other AWS services to provide both metering and contract-based pricing for your container product. For container-based products with usage pricing, you can use the AWS Marketplace Metering Service for both checking entitlement to use your product and metering usage for billing. For container-based products with contract pricing, you can use the AWS License Manager to associate licenses with your product. The following sections provide more information about hourly and custom metering with AWS Marketplace Metering Service and contract pricing with AWS License Manager.

Topics

Hourly and custom metering with AWS Marketplace Metering Service

To both check entitlement to use your product and to meter usage for billing, use the AWS Marketplace Metering Service. If you want to define your own pricing units and meter that usage to us for billing, integrate by using the MeterUsage API operation. If you want to price your product based on number of tasks or pods used and have AWS meter that usage automatically, integrate by using the RegisterUsage API operation. For both types of pricing, you can add a long-term contract price without changing how you integrate with the AWS Marketplace Metering Service.

When you create a new container product in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal, we provide a set of product identifiers (the product code and public key) that are used to integrate your product with the AWS Marketplace Metering Service.

Entitlement

Integrating with the AWS Marketplace Metering Service allows you to verify that the customer running your paid software is subscribed to your product on AWS Marketplace, guarding you against unauthorized use at container startup. To verify entitlement, use the MeterUsage or RegisterUsage API operations, depending on your pricing model. For hourly and fixed monthly pricing models, use the RegisterUsage API operation. For custom metering pricing models, use the MeterUsage API operation.

If a buyer isn't entitled to your product, these API operations return the CustomerNotEntitledException exception.

Note

If a buyer unsubscribes from your product while running it, they are entitled to continue running it. However, they can't launch additional containers for your product.

Integration guidelines

As you create and publish your container products and use the MeterUsage or RegisterUsage API operations for entitlement and metering, keep the following guidelines in mind:

  • Don't configure AWS credentials within your software or the Docker container image. AWS credentials for the buyer are automatically obtained at runtime when your container image is running within an Amazon ECS task or Amazon EKS pod.

  • To call the MeterUsage or RegisterUsage API operations from Amazon EKS, you must use a supported AWS SDK. To test MeterUsage or RegisterUsage integration of Amazon EKS, you must run an Amazon EKS cluster running Kubernetes 1.13.x or greater. Kubernetes 1.13 is required for AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles for pod support. IAM roles are required for the running pod to obtain the AWS credentials required to invoke these actions on Amazon EKS.

  • You can do local development, but you will get a PlatformNotSupportedException exception. This exception won't occur when you launch the container on AWS container services (Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and Fargate).

Supported AWS Regions

For a list of all AWS Marketplace supported AWS Regions, see Region Table on the Global Infrastructure website.

Obtaining the AWS Region for metering

When integrating your container for metering with either the MeterUsage or RegisterUsage API operation, don't configure the AWS SDK to use a specific AWS Region. The Region must be obtained dynamically at runtime.

For example, a customer launches an Amazon ECS task or Amazon EKS pod. The RegisterUsage API operation is called in a Region that differs from the Region where the Amazon ECS task or Amazon EKS pod was launched. Therefore, the RegisterUsage API operation throws an InvalidRegionException error.

AWS SDK languages don't determine the AWS_REGION in a consistent manner. If your SDK does not automatically pick up the AWS_REGION, software needs to be written manually to determine the AWS_Region. For example, the AWS SDK for Java automatically uses Amazon EC2 instance metadata (specifically, ec2InstanceMetadata) to obtain the Region when environment variables or other configuration aren't present. In this instance, only call ec2InstanceMetadata if the AWS_REGION environment variable isn’t present.

For information about how to dynamically obtain an AWS Region at runtime, refer to the AWS SDK Developer Guide for your programming language.

Preventing metering modification

Introducing ways for buyers to modify or override calls to RegisterUsage or MeterUsage might result in undesirable billing and payment issues. We strongly recommend that you integrate the metering and entitlement logic.

When engineering your product to prevent metering modification, keep the following in mind:

  • If buyers can insert new image layers that contain CMD or ENTRYPOINT instructions, directly integrate RegisterUsage or MeterUsage into the software that the buyer is running through your container image. Otherwise, calls to RegisterUsage or MeterUsage executed via CMD or ENTRYPOINT from the base image will likely be overridden by the buyer.

  • We recommend that you manage the AWS Marketplace product codes that your software uses as input to RegisterUsage or MeterUsage in a manner buyers can't modify. However, if your product manages product codes in a manner customers can override, such as AWS CloudFormation, Helm chart, or Kubernetes manifest, you must maintain a list of trusted AWS Marketplace product codes. This is to ensure that the product code your software passes as input to RegisterUsage or MeterUsage is valid.

  • If any of your trusted product codes are for free products, ensure that they can’t be used in place of a paid product code.

Contract pricing with AWS License Manager

For container-based products with contract pricing, you use AWS License Manager to associate licenses with your product.

AWS License Manager is a license management tool that enables your application to track and update licenses (also known as entitlements) that have been purchased by a customer. This section provides information about how to integrate your product with AWS License Manager. After the integration is complete, you can publish your product listing on AWS Marketplace.

For more information about AWS License Manager, see the AWS License Manager User Guide and the AWS License Manager section of the AWS CLI Command Reference.

Note

  • Customers can't launch new instances of the container after the contract expiry period. However, during the contract duration, they can launch any number of instances. These licenses are not bound to a specific node or instance. Any software running on any container on any node can checkout the license as long as it has the assigned AWS credentials.

  • Private Offer Creation – Sellers can generate private offers for the products using the Private offer creation tool in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal.

Integration workflow

The following steps show the workflow for integrating your container product with AWS License Manager:

  1. Seller creates a product with AWS License Manager integration.

  2. Seller lists the product on AWS Marketplace.

  3. Buyer finds the product on AWS Marketplace and purchases it.

  4. A license is sent to the buyer in their AWS account.

  5. Buyer uses the software by launching the Amazon EC2 instance, Amazon ECS task, or Amazon EKS pod software. The customer deploys using an IAM role.

  6. Software reads the license in the buyer's AWS License Manager account, discovers the entitlements purchased, and provisions the features accordingly.

    Note

    License Manager doesn't do any tracking or updates; this is done by the seller’s application.