Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM) provides the following editions that support different features and capabilities: Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition.Standard Edition is a free edition, and Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition are commercial editions. The billing methods vary depending on the edition. This topic describes the billable items and billing methods of ASM instances.
Billable items
- Mesh management:Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition extend the features of Standard Edition to enhance multi-protocol support and dynamic extension capabilities, provide fine-grained service governance, and improve the zero-trust security system. In addition, the commercial editions enhance performance, provide better support for large-scale clusters, and simplify the use of ASM instances in production environments. The mesh management fee varies with your edition of ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of mesh management (pay-as-you-go).
- Alibaba Cloud services: You are charged for Alibaba Cloud services that are used together with ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services.
Billing of mesh management (pay-as-you-go)
ASM instance fee = Unit price for a specific instance edition × Usage duration (hours)
The following table describes the unit prices for different editions of ASM instances.
- For more information about the features supported by different editions of ASM instances, see Functions and features.
- The prices provided in this topic are for reference only. The actual prices are subject to the buy page.
Edition | Maximum number of supported pods | Unit price | Remarks |
---|---|---|---|
Standard Edition | 50 Pod
Note We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments.
|
Free | We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments. |
Enterprise Edition | 1,000 Pod | USD 0.98 per hour per ASM instance |
|
Ultimate Edition | 10,000 Pod | USD 4.63 per hour per ASM instance |
Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services
The following table describes the billing of other Alibaba Cloud services that you create when you use ASM.
Alibaba Cloud service | Required | Description | Billing rules |
---|---|---|---|
Classic Load Balancer (CLB) | Yes | This service is used to access the Istio control plane and API server. For more information, see SLB overview. | |
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | Yes | This service is used to build a network environment and create routing rules for ASM instances. For more information, see What is a VPC?. | Billing |
Elastic IP Address (EIP) | No, but recommended | This service is used to expose the API server to the Internet. For more information, see EIP overview. | Billing overview |
Prometheus Service | No, but recommended | This service is used to monitor ASM instances and generate alerts when exceptions are detected. For more information, see What is Prometheus Service?. | Pay-as-you-go |
Log Service | No, but recommended | This service is used to collect access logs of ingress gateways in ASM instances. For more information, see What is Log Service?. | Billing overview |
Billing rules
Bill generation
- If you update an ASM instance from Enterprise Edition to Ultimate Edition at 10:15:00, the instance is billed for the billing cycle that lasts from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00 based on the pricing of Ultimate Edition.
- If you create an ASM instance of a commercial edition during 10:00:00 to 11:00:00 (excluding 11:00:00), the instance is billed for the billing cycle that lasts from 11:00:00 to 12:00:00. The bill for this billing cycle is generated between 12:10:00 and 12:30:00.
Overdue payment and instance release
If your Alibaba Cloud account does not have a sufficient balance for paying an ASM instance of a commercial edition, the payment for the ASM instance becomes overdue. In this case, you cannot access the Istio control plane or the API server of the clusters that are added to the ASM instance. In addition, services that run on the clusters on the data plane are affected. If you do not pay the overdue bill within 15 days after the overdue date, Alibaba Cloud stops providing the ASM service for you and removes the ASM instance from the console. However, Alibaba Cloud does not release the ASM instance. The ASM instance cannot be recovered after it is removed.