This topic describes ECS Bare Metal Instances and their Instance families and instance types.

ECS Bare Metal Instance overview

ECS Bare Metal Instances are a compute service that combines the elasticity of virtual machines and the performance and features of physical machines. ECS Bare Metal Instances are designed based on the state-of-the-art virtualization 2.0 technology developed by Alibaba Cloud. The virtualization used by ECS Bare Metal Instances is optimized to support common ECS instances and nested virtualization, maintaining the elastic performance of ECS instances and the performance and features of physical machines.

ECS Bare Metal Instances combine the strengths of both physical machines and ECS instances to deliver powerful and robust computing capabilities. ECS Bare Metal Instances use virtualization 2.0 to provide your business applications with direct access to the processor and memory resources of the underlying servers without virtualization overheads. ECS Bare Metal Instances keep the hardware feature sets (such as Intel® VT-x) and resource isolation capabilities of physical machines, ideal for applications that need to run in non-virtualization environments.

By virtue of the independently developed chips, hypervisor system software, and the redefined server hardware architecture, ECS Bare Metal Instances integrate features from both physical and virtual machines. ECS Bare Metal Instances can seamlessly connect with other Alibaba Cloud products for storage, networking, and database tasks. ECS Bare Metal Instances are fully compatible with ECS instance images. These properties allow you to build resources to suit your business requirements.

When you use ECS Bare Metal Instances, note the following items:
  • ECS Bare Metal Instances do not support instance type changes.
  • If a hardware fault occurs to an ECS Bare Metal Instance, a failover occurs and data is retained in the disks of the ECS Bare Metal Instance.

Benefits

ECS Bare Metal Instances provide the following benefits through technological innovation:
  • Exclusive computing resources

    ECS Bare Metal Instances provide better performance and resource isolation than standard physical machines and can ensure the exclusivity of computing resources without virtualization overheads or feature loss. ECS Bare Metal Instances support 8, 32, 80, 96, or 104 vCPUs and high clock speeds. An ECS Bare Metal Instance with eight vCPUs can provide a core frequency of 3.7 GHz to 4.1 GHz for better performance and faster response for gaming and finance businesses than peer services.

  • Chip-level security

    For security, ECS Bare Metal Instances use a chip-level trusted execution environment (Intel ® SGX) in addition to physical server isolation to ensure that encrypted data can only be computed within a secure and trusted environment. This chip-level hardware security protection provides a safe box for your data in the cloud and allows you to control all data encryption and key protection processes. For more information, see Install SGX.

  • Compatible with multiple private clouds

    ECS Bare Metal Instances can address the needs of high-performance computing and help you build new hybrid clouds. Thanks to the flexibility, elasticity, and other strengths inherited from the mix of physical and virtual machines, ECS Bare Metal Instances can implement re-virtualization. Offline private cloud business can be seamlessly migrated to Alibaba Cloud without performance overheads arising from nested virtualization, giving you a new method to move businesses onto the cloud.

  • Support for heterogeneous instruction set processors

    Virtualization 2.0 used by ECS Bare Metal Instances is developed independently by Alibaba Cloud, and supports instruction set processors such as ARM at no additional cost.

Comparison of ECS Bare Metal Instances, physical machines, and virtual machines

Compared with a physical machine with the same configuration, an ECS Bare Metal Instance delivers greater performance. During the Double 11 Shopping Festival, ECS Bare Metal Instances delivered robust computing capabilities with millions of vCPUs to handle traffic spikes.

The following table describes a comparison between the features of ECS Bare Metal Instances, physical machines, and virtual machines. In this table, Y means supported, N means not supported, and N/A means not applicable.

Feature type Feature ECS Bare Metal Instances Physical machine Virtual machine
Automated O&M Delivery within minutes Y N Y
Computing Zero performance loss Y Y N
Zero feature loss Y Y N
Zero resource preemption Y Y N
Storage Compatible with ECS disks Y N Y
Startup from disks (system disks) Y N Y
Quick reset of system disks Y N Y
Compatible with ECS images Y N Y
Cold migration between physical and virtual machines Y N Y
Free of OS installation Y N Y
Free of local RAID, and stronger protection of data in disks Y N Y
Networking Compatible with ECS VPCs Y N Y
Compatible with ECS classic networks Y N Y
Free of communication bottlenecks between physical and virtual machine clusters in VPCs Y N Y
Management Compatible with existing ECS management systems Y N Y
Consistent user experiences on features such as VNC with that of virtual machines Y N Y
Out-of-band (OOB) network security Y N N/A

ebmgn6e, compute optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family with GPU capabilities

Features
  • Provides flexible and powerful software-defined compute based on the X-Dragon architecture
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • Uses NVIDIA V100 (32 GB NVLink) GPU processors
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8163 (Skylake) processors
  • Uses NVIDIA V100 GPU computing accelerators (SXM2-based)
    • Powered by the innovative NVIDIA Volta architecture
    • 32 GB of HBM2 memory (900 GB/s bandwidth)
    • 5,120 CUDA Cores
    • 640 Tensor Cores
    • Supports up to six NVLink connections for a total bandwidth of 300 GB/s (25 GB/s per connection)
  • Provides strong network performance based on large computing capacity
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Deep learning applications such as training and inference applications of AI algorithms used in image classification, autonomous vehicles, and speech recognition
    • Scientific computing applications such as computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, molecular dynamics, and environmental analysis
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) GPUs GPU memory (GB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmgn6e.24xlarge 96 768.0 None 8 × V100 256 32.0 4,800 Yes 16 8 20
Note

ebmgn6v, compute optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family with GPU capabilities

Features
  • Provides flexible and powerful software-defined compute based on the X-Dragon architecture
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • Uses NVIDIA V100 GPU processors
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8163 (Skylake) processors
  • Uses NVIDIA V100 GPU computing accelerators (SXM2-based)
    • Powered by the innovative NVIDIA Volta architecture
    • 16 GB of HBM2 memory (900 GB/s bandwidth)
    • 5,120 CUDA Cores
    • 640 Tensor Cores
    • Supports up to six NVLink connections for a total bandwidth of 300 GB/s (25 GB/s per connection)
  • Provides strong network performance based on large computing capacity
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Deep learning applications such as training and inference applications of AI algorithms used in image classification, autonomous vehicles, and speech recognition
    • Scientific computing applications such as computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, molecular dynamics, and environmental analysis
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) GPUs GPU memory (GB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmgn6v.24xlarge 96 384.0 None 8 × V100 128 30.0 4,500 Yes 8 32 10
Note

ebmgn6i, compute optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family with GPU capabilities

Features
  • Provides flexible and powerful software-defined compute based on the X-Dragon architecture
  • I/O optimized
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8163 (Skylake) processors
  • Supports standard SSDs, ultra disks, and enhanced SSDs that deliver millions of IOPS
  • Uses NVIDIA T4 GPU computing accelerators:
    • Powered by the new NVIDIA Turing architecture
    • 16 GB memory capacity (320 GB/s bandwidth)
    • 2,560 CUDA Cores
    • Up to 320 Turing Tensor Cores
    • Mixed-precision Tensor Cores support 65 FP16 TFLOPS, 130 INT8 TOPS, and 260 INT4 TOPS
  • Provides strong network performance based on large computing capacity
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • AI (deep learning and machine learning) inference for computer vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural language processing (NLP), machine translation, and recommendation systems
    • Real-time rendering for cloud gaming
    • Real-time rendering for AR and VR applications
    • Graphics workstations or overloaded graphics computing
    • GPU-accelerated databases
    • High-performance computing
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) GPUs GPU memory (GB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmgn6i.24xlarge 96 384.0 None 4 × T4 64 30.0 4,500 Yes 8 32 10
Note

ebmc6, compute optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:1.8
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8269 (Cascade Lake) processors, 104 vCPUs, up to 3.2 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 6,000 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Scenarios where large volumes of packets are received and transmitted, such as on-screen video comments and telecom data forwarding
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • Video encoding, decoding, and rendering
    • Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game frontends
    • High-performance science and engineering applications
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmc6.26xlarge 104 192.0 None 30.0 6,000 Yes 8 32 10
Note

ebmg6, general purpose ECS Bare Metal Instance family

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:3.7
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8269 (Cascade Lake) processors, 104 vCPUs, up to 3.2 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 6,000 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • Video encoding, decoding, and rendering
    • Enterprise-level applications, such as large and medium-sized databases
    • Computing clusters and memory-intensive data processing
    • Data analysis and computing
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmg6.26xlarge 104 384.0 None 30.0 6,000 Yes 8 32 10
Note

ebmr6, memory optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:7.4
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8269 (Cascade Lake) processors, 104 vCPUs, up to 3.2 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 6,000 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • High-performance databases and in-memory databases
    • Data analysis and mining, and distributed memory cache
    • Hadoop clusters, Spark clusters, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmr6.26xlarge 104 768.0 None 30.0 6,000 Yes 8 32 10
Note

ebmhfc6, compute optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family with high clock speed

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:2.4
  • Equipped with 3.1 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8269 (Cascade Lake) processors, 80 vCPUs, up to 3.5 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 6,000 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Scenarios where large volumes of packets are received and transmitted, such as on-screen video comments and telecom data forwarding
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • Video encoding, decoding, and rendering
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmhfc6.20xlarge 800 192.0 None 30.0 6,000 Yes 8 32 10
Note

ebmhfg6, general purpose ECS Bare Metal Instance family with high clock speed

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4.8
  • Equipped with 3.1 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8269 (Cascade Lake) processors, 80 vCPUs, up to 3.5 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 6,000 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • Enterprise-level applications, such as large and medium-sized databases
    • Video encoding, decoding, and rendering
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmhfg6.20xlarge 80 384.0 None 30.0 6,000 Yes 8 32 10
Note

ebmhfr6, memory optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family with high clock speed

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:9.6
  • Equipped with 3.1 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8269 (Cascade Lake) processors, 80 vCPUs, up to 3.5 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 6,000 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • High-performance databases and in-memory databases
    • Data analysis and mining, and distributed memory cache
    • Hadoop clusters, Spark clusters, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmhfr6.20xlarge 80 768.0 None 30.0 6,000 Yes 8 32 10
Note

ebmc5s, compute optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family with enhanced network performance

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:2
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8163 (Skylake) processors, 96 vCPUs, up to 2.7 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 4,500 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Scenarios where large volumes of packets are received and transmitted, such as on-screen video comments and telecom data forwarding
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • Video encoding, decoding, and rendering
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmc5s.24xlarge 96 192.0 None 30.0 4,500 No 8 32 10
Note

ebmg5s, general purpose ECS Bare Metal Instance family with enhanced network performance

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8163 (Skylake) processors, 96 vCPUs, up to 2.7 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 4,500 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • Enterprise-level applications, such as large and medium-sized databases
    • Video encoding
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmg5s.24xlarge 96 384.0 None 30.0 4,500 No 8 32 10
Note

ebmr5s, memory optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family with enhanced network performance

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports enhanced SSDs, standard SSDs, and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:8
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8163 (Skylake) processors, 96 vCPUs, up to 2.7 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 4,500 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • High-performance databases and in-memory databases
    • Data analysis and mining, and distributed memory cache
    • Hadoop clusters, Spark clusters, and other memory-intensive enterprise applications
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmr5s.24xlarge 96 768.0 None 30.0 4,500 No 8 32 10
Note

ebmhfg5, ECS Bare Metal Instance family with high clock speed

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports only standard SSDs and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4
  • Equipped with 3.7 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® E3-1240v6 (Skylake) processors, 8 vCPUs, up to 4.1 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 2,000 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Does not support automatic failover
  • Supports Intel ® SGX
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Gaming or finance applications requiring high performance
    • High-performance Web servers
    • Enterprise-level applications such as high-performance databases
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmhfg5.2xlarge 8 32.0 None 6.0 200 No 8 6 8
Note

ebmc4, compute optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports only standard SSDs and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:2
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® E5-2682 v4 (Broadwell) processors, up to 2.9 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 4,000 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • Enterprise-level applications, such as large and medium-sized databases
    • Video encoding
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmc4.8xlarge 32 64.0 None 10.0 4,000 No 8 12 10
Note

ebmg5, general purpose ECS Bare Metal Instance family

Features
  • I/O optimized
  • Supports only standard SSDs and ultra disks
  • CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4
  • Equipped with 2.5 GHz Intel ® Xeon ® Platinum 8163 (Skylake) processors, 96 vCPUs, up to 2.7 GHz Turbo Boost
  • High network performance: 4,000 Kpps packet forwarding rate
  • Supports VPCs only
  • Provides dedicated hardware resources and physical isolation
  • Suitable for the following scenarios:
    • Workloads that require direct access to physical resources, or scenarios that require a license to be bound to the hardware
    • Third-party virtualization (including but not limited to Xen and KVM), and AnyStack (including but not limited to OpenStack and ZStack)
    • Containers (including but not limited to Docker, Clear Containers, and Pouch)
    • Enterprise-level applications, such as large and medium-sized databases
    • Video encoding
Instance types
Instance type vCPUs Memory (GiB) Local storage (GiB) Bandwidth (Gbit/s) Packet forwarding rate (Kpps) IPv6 support NIC queues ENIs (including one primary ENI) Private IP addresses per ENI
ecs.ebmg5.24xlarge 96 384.0 None 10.0 4,000 No 8 32 10
Note

Billing method

ECS Bare Metal Instances support pay-as-you-go and subscription billing methods. For more information, see Billing method comparison.