Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud - Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It's designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you want to.

Region Availability

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is available in the following regions in China:

  • Beijing Region

  • Ningxia Region

Feature Availability and Implementation Differences

The Amazon Web Services in China implementation of Amazon EC2 is unique in the following ways:

  • Starter accounts—For customers with an Internal Access Account, Amazon EC2 public Internet ports are blocked. Internal ports remain available. For more information, see Signup, Accounts, and Credentials.

  • Limited instance types—Only some Amazon EC2 instance types are available. For a complete list of the available instance types, see Amazon EC2 instance types.

  • No Amazon Systems Manager for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager—SCVMM is not available.

  • EC2 AMI Tools—The Beijing and Ningxia Regions use a non-default public key certificate to encrypt Amazon Machine Image (AMI) manifests. The ec2-bundle-image, ec2-bundle-vol, ec2-migrate-bundle, and ec2-migrate-manifest commands require the --ec2cert $EC2_AMITOOL_HOME/etc/ec2/amitools/cert-ec2-cn-north-1.pem option in the Beijing Region, and the --ec2cert $EC2_AMITOOL_HOME/etc/ec2/amitools/cert-ec2-cn-northwest-1.pem option in the Ningxia Region.

  • Cross-region copy operations are supported only between the Beijing and Ningxia Regions.

  • VM Export—The Amazon S3 bucket for the destination image must exist and must have WRITE and READ_ACP permissions granted to the Beijing Region account with the following canonical ID: 834bafd86b15b6ca71074df0fd1f93d234b9d5e848a2cb31f880c149003ce36f.

  • VM Import—Windows 11 is not supported.

  • VM Import—Windows Server 2022 is not supported.

  • By default, enhanced networking is not enabled on Windows Server 2012 R2 AMIs. For more information, see Enabling Enhanced Networking on Windows Instances in a VPC.

  • IPv6 is supported. For more information about IPv6 support for Amazon S3 and other services, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China.

  • Systems Manager Automation — The aws:copyImage action is not supported.

  • Spot Instance requests—The AWSServiceRoleForEC2Spot service-linked role is not created for you automatically. Create a service-linked role with this name, using spot.amazonaws.com as the service name and AWSEC2SpotServiceRolePolicy as the policy.

  • Reserved Instances:

    • No Reserved Instance Marketplace—The Reserved Instance Marketplace is not available.

    • No three-year-term Standard Reserved Instances—Standard Reserved Instances are not available in three-year terms.

    • Reserved Instance Discount Pricing Tiers—For more information, see Understanding Reserved Instance Discount Pricing Tiers.

      Pricing Tiers
      Total List Value of Reserved Instances Upfront discount Hourly discount
      Less than ¥3200000 0% 0%
      ¥3200000 to ¥25000000 5% 5%
      ¥25000000 to ¥64000000 10% 10%
      More than ¥64000000 Contact us Contact us
  • The Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) EBS volume type is not available in the China Regions.

  • Amazon Nitro Enclaves is not available in the China Regions.

  • Spot Instance data feed is not available in the China Regions.

  • EC2 Fleet can't launch On-Demand Instances into targeted Capacity Reservations in the China Regions.

  • The lastLaunchedTime AMI attribute is not available in the China Regions.

  • Credential Guard is not available in the China Regions.

  • Bringing your own IP address ranges (BYOIP) is not available in the China Regions.

  • Amazon EC2 instance topology is not available in the China Regions.

  • Mac instances are not available in the China Regions.

Guides and References

Amazon Web Services in China user guides are available in HTML and PDF, in both Chinese and English. API references are available in HTML and PDF. Some API references may be available only in English. Currently, not all API references are available in the Beijing and Ningxia Regions. Links to some API references will take you to the global Amazon Web Services site. Note that some features and functionality described in the guides and references may not be available in the current Amazon Web Services in China release.

General Information About Amazon Web Services in China

The following information applies to all Amazon Web Services that are available in the China Regions.

Amazon Web Services Accounts in the China Regions

To use services in the Beijing and Ningxia Regions, you need an account and credentials specific to each of those Regions.

  • Accounts and credentials for other Amazon Regions will not work for services operating in the Beijing and Ningxia Regions.

  • Accounts and credentials for the Beijing and Ningxia Regions will not work for other Amazon Regions.

  • For more information, see Signup, Accounts, and Credentials.

Domain for Amazon Web Services in China

The domain for Amazon Web Services in China is www.amazonaws.cn.

Endpoints & Amazon Resource Names (ARNs)

For information about endpoints and ARNs in Amazon Web Services in China, see Endpoints and ARNs for Amazon Web Services in China.

Availability Zones for the China Regions

  • In the Beijing Region, there are three Availability Zones.

  • In the Ningxia Region, there are three Availability Zones.

General Information for Amazon Web Services in China

The following applies to all Amazon Web Services that are available in the China Regions. For detailed information about specific Amazon Web Services, see the service-specific topic in this guide.

  • Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM)

    • You can grant or deny a service access to resources using the Principal policy element.

    • Service principal values vary by Region.

  • EC2-Classic Platform

    • The EC2-Classic platform is not supported.

  • Free Usage Tier

    • The free usage tier is supported in the Ningxia Region.

    • The free usage tier is not supported in the Beijing Region.

Amazon Web Services Console

The console for Amazon Web Services in China is unique to China. The screenshots in the Amazon Web Services guides might differ from what you see on your console. For information about differences in service functionality, see the topics for each service in this guide.

Code Examples

The Amazon Web Services documentation might include endpoints and ARNs in code examples that are not specific to the Beijing and Ningxia Regions. When using examples, verify you are using the endpoints and ARNs for your Region.