What's the difference between EC2 Community AMIs and Marketplace AMIs

Question

Ubuntu certify their Cloud image as ami-f95ef58a, and it's available as a Community AMI in region eu-west-1. See Ubuntu documentation here

Centos on the other hand publish their official AMI in AWS Marketplace with a cost of zero. See Centos documentation here.

In both cases there is no charge.

So I am left confused about the difference Amazon intend us to care about between Community and Marketplace?

Answer 1

• Community AMIs: Whenever you create an AMI, you can add permissions to it to make it public. In that case, it goes to "community AMIs". These are AMIs that comes from AWS users, and are not verified by AWS
• Makerplace: this is a whole service at AWS, and all AMIs here are verified by AWS. It is basically used for software vendors to sell their products through AWS. The customers will be billed by AWS only, but then AWS will pay the AMI owner in return. For Centos this is a bit particular, as this is a free distribution. But been in the marketplace conforts the users that the AMI is safe