When reserving an Amazon EC2 instance, what does it mean for the Platform to be the same?

5
votes

In the user guide [1] , it is stated that for your on demand ec2 instances to be billed under your reserved instances, they have to match four criteria.

  • the region,
  • Availability Zone,
  • instance type,
  • and platform specified

The Platform is confusing, because I use a custom Ubuntu AMI and in the EC2 Dashboard, my Platform field is blank.

When choosing a Reserved Instance, you can choose from "Linux/UNIX " and "Linux/UNIX ( Amazon VPC ) " , Red Hat , SUSE , etc.

So how will I get charged?

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/reserved-instances-fundamentals.html

1
amazon-ec2

1 Answers

5
votes

You would choose "Linux/Unix". Flavors of Linux such as Redhat and SUSE include additional licensing fees not charged for other versions of linux, which is why they are considered separate platforms.