A shared image is an image that another Alibaba Cloud account has shared with your account. You can share a custom image with multiple Alibaba Cloud accounts or within an organization in the same region. This lets you quickly deploy consistent application environments and avoid rebuilding the same image.
Applicability
Sharing is supported only between accounts in the same region. If you share an encrypted custom image, sharing is supported only in the following regions:
China (Beijing)
China (Shanghai)
China (Hong Kong)
Singapore
Indonesia (Jakarta)
You cannot reshare an image that was shared with your account.
You cannot share custom images created from Alibaba Cloud Marketplace images between Alibaba Cloud accounts on the China site and the international site.
Sharing methods
Sharing method | Use cases | Benefits | Limitations and notes |
Share with specified accounts | Share an image with a small number of specific partners or individual accounts. | Easy to use. | You must manually manage the recipient account IDs. |
Share within an organization | Dynamically share an image with your entire organization or with member accounts in a specific folder using Resource Directory. | When members join or leave the organization, sharing permissions are automatically updated. | This method depends on the Resource Sharing service of Resource Directory. The Alibaba Cloud account that is sharing the image must meet one of the following conditions:
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Billing
Image sharing is free of charge. However, if a recipient uses a shared image created from a paid image to create an ECS instance, the recipient is charged for the image.
For example, source image A is a paid image. Alibaba Cloud account A shares this image with Alibaba Cloud account B. If account B uses the shared image to create an instance, account B is charged for the image in addition to the instance resources.
Limitations
The number of accounts with which an image can be shared is limited by a quota. Sharing an image does not count against the recipient's custom image quota. To view the specific limit, go to the Quota Center and check the Quota of users that can be shared per custom image item. For more information, see ECS quota management.
You cannot share a custom image from ECS to Simple Application Server. However, you can share a custom image from Simple Application Server to ECS.