Release: Amazon DevPay on 2009-10-01
New Features
| Feature | Description | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All Windows instance types enable Authentication Services | On October 1, 2009, AWS announced that all Amazon EC2 running Windows instances have been upgraded to allow the use of Authentication Services (e.g., Kerberos and LDAP). This change consolidates Amazon EC2 running Windows instances and Amazon EC2 running Windows with Authentication Services instances into a single offering called Amazon EC2 running Windows (with and without SQL Server), at the lower price ($0.125/hour for an m1.small). Now, all Windows instance include the Authentication Services, without extra cost to you.
What does this mean for your paid and supported AMIs? Starting October 1, if you have customers using your Amazon EC2 running Windows with Authentication Services paid AMIs, you will begin to pay the lower Amazon EC2 rates for your customers' use (the rate for regular Amazon EC2 running Windows AMIs). However, your customers will continue to pay your original price until November 1. Starting November 1, all Amazon EC2 running Windows with Authentication Services paid AMIs will become Amazon EC2 running Windows paid AMIs. So, your customers will start paying whatever price you've set for Amazon EC2 running Windows instances. For example, let's say the following table shows the rates you and your customers pay for small Amazon EC2 running Windows instances, before October 1. Before October 1
As of October 1, you start paying the lower AWS rate for your customers' use of your Amazon EC2 running Windows with Authentication Services paid AMI ($0.125), but your customers keep paying your normal price of $0.30 per hour (giving you a temporary increase in margin). October 1-31
Starting November 1, your customers will begin to pay whatever price you've set for Amazon EC2 running Windows instances ($0.15). Your AMIs now (by default) automatically include the use of Authentication Services. November 1 and later
What if you haven't enabled Amazon EC2 running Windows instances for your product? Effectively the table for before October 1 would look like this: Before October 1
In this case, as of November 1, your customers wouldn't be able to launch your Amazon EC2 running Windows paid AMIs, and any running instances would be in danger of being shut down. Therefore you should take action to enable your product for regular Windows instances. Note that what you're effectively doing is changing the product's configuration (for more information, go to Your Product's Configuration and Price in the Amazon DevPay Developer Guide). Even if your product already has a price for Amazon EC2 running Windows instances, you should confirm that it's still the price you'd like to charge in light of the changes AWS has made to the instance functionality. If you need to update your product's price or configuration, we recommend that you begin planning for the change now and not wait until November 1 is close. If you don't have any customers using your Amazon EC2 running Windows paid AMIs yet, you can do an active price change that takes effect immediately. Therefore, new customers will immediately start paying your desired price. If you have customers using your Amazon EC2 running Windows paid AMIs, we recommend you do a passive price change and give your customers at least 14 days' notice of the change. Note that when you do the price change, you'll no longer see an option to set a price for Amazon EC2 running Windows with Authentication Services instances. For more information about changing your product's price, see Changing Pricing in the Amazon DevPay Developer Guide. Up until November 1, you and your customers can continue to re-bundle your existing paid AMIs that have Authentication Services. After that, the AMIs are automatically converted to Amazon EC2 running Windows AMIs. |
Known Issues
| Issue | Description |
|---|---|
| Failure of Sign-Up Payment | If your product has a sign-up/monthly fee, and the customer's sign-up payment fails because the payment method isn't valid, the customer is not officially subscribed to your product. This can be verified with VerifyProductSubscriptionByTokens (for desktop products) or VerifyProductSubscriptionByPid (for hosted products), which returns a value of "false". The customer can't use the product, even if you've activated the customer. We recommend your product poll the customer's subscription status after activating the customer. If the status is still "false" 15 minutes after activation, then the product should display a special message when the customer tries to use the product the first time. The message should tell the customer to:
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| Error in WSDL | The License Service WSDL (at https://ls.amazonaws.com/doc/2008-04-28/AmazonLS.wsdl) incorrectly lists a child element called RequestId in the ErrorResponse element. The correct name of the element is RequestID (with a capital D). Our plan is to update the WSDL to match what the service actually returns (RequestID). |
| Limitation on AWS services used | You can build an application that monetizes Amazon EC2 or Amazon Simple Storage Service, but not both. |
| Limitation on decimal places for prices | You can set prices with a maximum of only two decimal places. |
| Throttling of License Service requests per developer | Requests to the License Service are throttled as necessary. They are throttled per developer instead of per DevPay product. Therefore, if you have multiple DevPay products, the sum of the requests from all your DevPay products is used to determine whether your requests need to be throttled. |
| Information not available on the first of the month | If you visit your DevPay Activity page on the first of the month, your revenue statement for the previous month might not yet be available. We instead recommend that you view the page after you've received the e-mail from AWS that indicates the revenue statement is available. Also, the page might display zeros for all the values because the page has not yet been updated with the information for the first day of the month. If this happens, we recommend that you return to the page on the second day of the month. |
| Withdrawal limit | When you withdraw money from your Amazon Payments account, the withdrawal amount must be at least $10.00. |
| No sandbox for testing | DevPay does not have a sandbox for testing. All testing you perform involves movement of real money. |
