If you run long-term online applications, we recommend that you use savings plans to offset the bills of elastic container instances. This topic describes how to use savings plans to offset the bills of long-term elastic container instances.
Purchase savings plans
A savings plan is a discount privilege plan that allows you to receive discounts for pay-as-you-go instances in exchange for a commitment to use a consistent amount of resources within a one-year or three-year period. The amount of resources is measured in USD/hour. After a savings plan takes effect, the savings plan applies to eligible pay-as-you-go instances to reduce costs of using the service. The discount that you are entitled to when you use a savings plan is affected by factors such as the type, subscription period, and payment type of the savings plan. Before you purchase a savings plan, carefully read the effective rules of the savings plan and select a suitable savings plan based on your business requirements. For more information about savings plans, see Overview.
Item | General-purpose savings plan | ECS compute savings plan | Elastic savings plan |
Offset limits | None. | The savings plans must match specific instance types of Elastic Compute Service (ECS). The savings plans can offset the bills of only elastic container instances that are created by using specific ECS instance types and billed based on the ECS instance types. | The savings plans offset bills based on the actual resource usage. The savings plans can offset the bills of only elastic container instances that are created by using specific vCPU and memory specifications and billed based on the vCPU and memory specifications. |
Hourly commitment | You purchase a savings plan with an hourly spend commitment. Then, you are charged the hourly commitment regardless of whether the savings plan is applied. | You purchase a savings plan with an hourly spend commitment. Then, you are charged the hourly commitment regardless of whether the savings plan is applied. | You purchase a savings plan with a total spend commitment, instead of an hourly spend commitment. Then, you are not charged and the total spend commitment is not consumed if the savings plan is not applied, and your usage that can be covered by the savings plan per hour is up to 1/1,460 of the total commitment. |
Payment options | All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront. | All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront. | All Upfront. |
Commitment terms | 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years. | 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years. | 1 year. |
Scenarios | These savings plans are suitable for scenarios in which resource usage is stable, such as system upgrades and cluster deployment. In the scenarios, instances may be periodically created and released but the overall usage is relatively stable. | These savings plans are suitable for scenarios in which resource usage is stable, such as system upgrades and cluster deployment. In the scenarios, instances may be periodically created and released but the overall usage is relatively stable. | These savings plans are suitable for scenarios in which resource usage periodically changes and bursts only occur during a specific period of time, such as during livestreaming events and food delivery service peak times. |
For more information, see Savings Plan in the ECS console. When you purchase a savings plan, you can adopt a plan recommended by the system or select a plan based on your consumption trends.
If you want to optimize the costs of existing elastic container instances, you can go to the Purchase recommendation page of savings plans to obtain the purchase recommendation.
If you have no existing elastic container instances, you can calculate the price of an elastic container instance and your hourly commitment based on the offset. Then, you can go to the Savings Plan buy page to purchase savings plans.
For more information, see Purchase and apply savings plans.
View offset information of a savings plan
After you purchase a savings plan, the system matches the savings plan with elastic container instances to offset bills. You do not need to manually match the resources. You can view the offset information of the savings plan in the Billing Management console.
View bills of elastic container instances
On the Bill Details page, click the Billing Details tab. You can view the billing details by instance. For the fees of elastic container instances that are offset by savings plans, no bills are generated.
View the effect of savings plans
In the left-side navigation pane of the Billing Management console, choose Savings Plan > Overview. On the Overview page, you can view the overview, details, usage, and coverage of savings plans.