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Elastic Compute Service:Economical mode

Last Updated:Jan 30, 2024

You can use the economical mode of pay-as-you-go Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances to retain instance data and configurations while reducing costs. When your pay-as-you-go instances are in economical mode, you are no longer billed for the computing resources (vCPUs and memory) of the instances and continue being billed for the other instance resources, such as system-assigned public IP addresses, disks (including system disks and data disks), elastic IP addresses (EIPs), and images. This topic describes the limits, billing rules, and risks about the economical mode, as well as how to enable the economical mode.

Limits

To support the economical mode, ECS instances must meet the following criteria:

  • The instances are deployed in virtual private clouds (VPCs).

    You can migrate ECS instances from the classic network to VPCs. For more information, see Migrate ECS instances from the classic network to a VPC.

  • The instances are pay-as-you-go instances, including preemptible instances.

    You can change the billing method of ECS instances from subscription to pay-as-you-go. For more information, see Change the billing method of an instance from subscription to pay-as-you-go.

  • The instance families of the instances are not equipped with local storage.

    Instance families equipped with local storage do not support the economical mode, such as instance families that use local SSDs and big data instance families. For information about how to view instance types equipped with local storage, see the Local storage column of tables in Overview of instance families.

  • The instance families of the instances are not equipped with persistent memory.

    Instance families equipped with persistent memory do not support the economical mode, such as re6p and re6p-redis instance families. For information about how to view instance types that are equipped with persistent memory, see the Persistent memory column of tables in Overview of instance families.

Billing after the economical mode is triggered

The following table describes whether billing for resources stops or continues after instances are stopped in economical mode.

Resource

Billing

  • Computing resources (vCPUs and memory), including the GPUs, FPGAs, and NPUs of heterogeneous computing instances

  • System-assigned public IP addresses

These resources are recycled and no longer billed.

  • System disks

  • Data disks

  • EIPs

  • Images

  • Snapshots

These resources are retained and continue being billed at the pay-as-you-go rates. For more billing details, see Pay-as-you-go.

Risks

When an instance enters the economical mode, its computing resources (vCPUs and memory), system-assigned public IP address, and public bandwidth that uses the pay-by-bandwidth metering method are recycled and no longer billed. This may cause the following issues:

  • After the computing resources (vCPUs and memory) are recycled, the instance may fail to be restarted due to insufficient resources. If instance restart fails, try again later or change the instance to another instance type. For more information, see Change the instance type of a pay-as-you-go instance.

  • When the instance is restarted, a new public IP address is automatically assigned to the instance and may be different from the previous system-assigned public IP address that is recycled. The private IP address of the instance remains unchanged.

    Important

    If applications depend on the current system-assigned public IP address of the instance, we recommend that you stop the instance in standard mode or convert the system-assigned public IP address into an EIP. For information about how to convert a system-assigned public IP address into an EIP, see Convert the public IP address of an instance in a VPC to an EIP.

  • If the instance is a burstable instance, the instance stops earning CPU credits and the CPU credit balance is cleared. When you restart the instance, the instance starts earning CPU credits again. For more information about CPU credits of burstable instances, see the CPU credits section in the "Overview" topic.

Sometimes, you may need to stop and then restart an instance within a short period of time. To ensure that the instance can be restarted and run as expected, we recommend that you stop the instance in standard mode. For example, in the following scenarios, you need to restart an instance shortly after you stop the instance:

Enable the economical mode

You can use one of the following methods to enable the economical mode for an ECS instance.

Important

After you enable the default economical mode, ECS instances in your account can automatically stop in economical mode when payments become overdue. For more information, see the Enable the default economical mode section in this topic.

Enable the economical mode in the ECS console

When you stop an instance, set Stop Mode to Economical Mode and click OK. The instance is stopped in economical mode.

normal-stop

Enable the economical mode by calling an API operation

Call the StopInstance operation with the StoppedMode parameter set to StopCharging to stop an instance. The instance is stopped in economical mode.

View the stop mode of an instance

After a pay-as-you-go instance is stopped, you can check whether the economical mode is triggered for the instance in the ECS console.

On the Instances page, find the stopped instance that you want to check and view the stop mode in the Status column.

  • Standard Mode: The economical mode is not triggered.

  • Economical Mode: The economical mode is triggered.

Note

After you select Economical Mode to stop an instance, Standard Mode may be displayed in the Status column corresponding to the instance when the instance is being stopped. We recommend that you recheck the stop mode of the instance later.

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Enable the default economical mode

After you enable the default economical mode, Economical Mode is selected by default for all instances in your account that support the economical mode. You can configure the Stop Mode parameter to specify whether to stop instances in economical mode. For more information, see the Enable the economical mode section in this topic.

  1. Log on to the ECS console.

  2. In the Overview section of the Overview page, click Custom Settings.

    VPC内实例停机不收费-用户设置

  3. Turn on Economical Mode.

  4. In the message that appears, read the notes and click Enable Economical Mode in the lower part.

FAQ

References

You can use the scheduled startup and shutdown feature of CloudOps Orchestration Service (OOS) to batch manage the startup and shutdown time of multiple instances. You can use the feature together with the economical mode to reduce costs. For more information, see Scheduled startup and shutdown.