Order types

On AliCloud, there are usually two order types: BYOL and on-demand.

BYOL offers perpetual (normal series and v-series) and annual subscription (s-series, available starting Q4 2019) licensing as opposed to on-demand. Subscription is month-based whereas PAYG is hour-based. BYOL licenses are available for purchase from resellers or your distributors, and the publicly available price list, which is updated quarterly, lists prices. BYOL licensing provides the same ordering practice across all private and public clouds, no matter what the platform is. You must activate a license for the first time you access the instance from the GUI or CLI before you can start using various features.

On-demand is term-based and has two options: subscription and PAYG. With an on-demand subscription, the FortiGate-VM becomes available for use immediately after you create the instance. The marketplace product page mentions term-based prices (hourly or annually).

In both BYOL and on-demand, cloud vendors charge separately for resource consumption on computing instances, storage, and so on, without use of software running on top of it (in this case the FortiGate-VM).

• For BYOL, you typically order a combination of products and services including support entitlement. New s-series SKUs contain the VM base and service bundle entitlements for easier ordering. To proceed with licensing a BYOL deployment, see Registering and downloading licenses.
• To purchase on-demand, all you need to do is launch the product on the marketplace. However, you must contact Fortinet Support with your customer information to obtain support entitlement. See Creating a support account. See Support on the marketplace product page.

On-demand FortiGate-VM instances do not support the use of virtual domains (VDOMs). If you plan to use VDOMs, deploy BYOL instances instead.

When using a FortiGate-VM PAYG instance, the FortiOS GUI may display expiry dates for FortiGuard services. However, these expiries are automatically extended for as long as the PAYG instance's lifespan. You do not need to be concerned about the expiry of FortiGuard services. For example, the following screenshot shows 2038/01/02.