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I'm seeking objective answers, so that this is not closed as subjective. Question may be moved to a different site if required.

What is the difference between AWS Marketplace and sudo apt-get install, and how do I decide to choose one over the other?

I noted that Amazon AWS has a marketplace with ready-to-deploy offerings like LAMP Stack from Bitnami. But tutorials often instruct you to create a blank EC2 instance, SSH into it, and manually install software using commands like sudo apt-get install lamp-server^.

Are they the same? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each method?

If I get an offering from the AWS Marketplace, can I install other software to the same EC2 instance using either method? If there's a paid offering from AWS Marketplace that I used sudo apt-get to install, will Amazon charge me? (They should, right? Or that will be a big loophole many will exploit.)

ADTC
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AWS Marketplace allows you as a developer or company to create a re-usable AMI pre-packaged with an installation of software. This installation can then be used by end users, either paid for, or free.

As a user, it allows you to easily provision servers with software pre-installed. A very common use case is to allow people to license software hourly rather than upfront or monthly (hence fitting into the elasticity of AWS). For instance, if I have Software X which I need a baseline of 10 servers, I may pay the developer for a perpetual licence for 10 - however at peaks I'll use AWS Marketplace and license by the hour as necessary

Are they the same? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each method?

Often software pre-installed onto an AMI will come pre-configured - so for instance the Bitnami AMIs allow you to easily deploy Wordpress fully pre-configured.

This does, however, mean that the initial configuration choices that were made by a third party can impact (positively or negatively) your application. Subsequently you may choose to install and configure your own applications from scratch - possibly even creating an AMI yourself which you can re-use for further deployments of that application

If there's a paid offering from AWS Marketplace that I used sudo apt-get to install, will Amazon charge me? (They should, right? Or that will be a big loophole many will exploit.)

Amazon will not charge you, no. If for instance there was a paid Wordpress AMI, and you then created an EC2 instance, installed Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Wordpress -- Amazon would not charge you anything additional.

alexjs
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  • Thanks. The licensing part make sense, since if you do `apt-get install` you will only get a trial version (if any available) and you will need to purchase a separate license for the software. *Your answer is nice and clear. Thank you, I have upvoted and I will accept in a couple of days (as a matter of my own policy, I wait a bit to give others a chance to respond).* – ADTC Jan 02 '16 at 06:26
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To make it simple: with an AMI you get a pre-configured virtual computer and with sudo apt-get install (or an empty ec2 instance) you get a blank machine and you configure it by yourself.

So:

AMI

  • You have to pay ec2 fee.
  • AMI creator could charge you the rent of his creation (but it can be free).
  • You get a ready-to-go instance but maybe it has more things than what you need.

Blank instance

  • You have to pay ec2 fee.

  • No one charges you anything if you use free software.

  • You install just what you need.

manuel
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