How to prevent customer from replicating/duplicating my AMIs from marketplace?

Question

I have created an AMI that I wanted to sell on AWS marketplace. There is inbuilt authentication in AMI when booted up. But I'm worried if the customer duplicates or replicates the AMI without authorization. Is there any way to prevent the unauthorized duplication of AMIs?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

According to the AWS documentation

You can't copy an AMI that was obtained from the AWS Marketplace, regardless of whether you obtained it directly or it was shared with you. Instead, launch an EC2 instance using the AWS Marketplace AMI and then create an AMI from the instance.

Therefore the only way for someone to launch another instance is to launch another via the AWS Marketplace.

Answer 2

There is absolutely no technical way to prevent unauthorized duplication of the content of a marketplace AMI.

Buyers have OS-level administration access to the AMI

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/marketplace/latest/userguide/aws-marketplace-listing-checklist.html

This is a requirement of the AWS Marketplace. The files on your AMI are trivially accessible.

Protection against unauthorized duplication and usage is a licensing restriction, not a technical one.