What’s the Difference Between Amazon FPS and Amazon DevPay?

Weve heard from a few folks that its not clear what the difference is between some of the Amazon Web Service offerings. This is a very short post to try to clarify two services, plus a product feature. Like most short descriptions, I am short-changing the rich feature set of each offering. Visit aws.amazon.com for more information on each.

Using Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), developers can accept payments on websites. It has several innovative features, including support for micropayments.

Amazon DevPay instruments two Amazon Web Services to enable a new sort of Software as a Service. Amazon DevPay supports applications built on Amazon S3 or Amazon EC2 by allowing you to resell applications built on top of one of these services. You determine the retail price, which is a mark-up above Amazons base price. Customers pay for your application by paying Amazon. We deduct the base price plus a small commission; then deposit the rest into your Amazon account.

Amazon EC2 Public AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are not a service as such. Rather these virtual server representations are a feature of Amazon EC2, designed with Amazon DevPay in mind. They are usually configured with your value-add software that you want to monetize using a monthly fee and/or markup above the base fee that Amazon charges. One of the best-known examples of a public AMI is Red Hat RHEL, which is available for a monthly fee plus an hourly fee. Its fully supported by Red Hat, which makes the virtual version of their software viable for many companies who are Red Hat customers.

— Mike