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 the other editions are commercial editions. The pricing of the editions varies with each other. 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 three commercial editions enhance performance, provide better support for large-scale clusters, and simplify the use of ASM instances in production environments. You are charged different mesh management fees for different editions of ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of mesh management.
- Alibaba Cloud services: You are charged for other Alibaba Cloud services that are used when you use ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services.
Billing of mesh management
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.
Edition | Maximum scale supported | Unit price | Remarks |
---|---|---|---|
Standard Edition | 50 pods
Note We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments.
|
Free of charge | We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments. |
Enterprise Edition | 1,000 pods | USD 0.98 per hour-ASM instance |
|
Ultimate Edition | 10,000 pods | USD 4.63 per hour-ASM instance |
Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services
The following table describes the billing of other Alibaba Cloud services related to ASM.
Alibaba Cloud service | Required | Description | Billing description |
---|---|---|---|
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 What is an EIP?. | 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?. | Billing of Alibaba Cloud Prometheus Service |
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?. | Overview |
Billing
Billing method
ASM supports only the pay-as-you-go billing method. The CLB service on which ASM depends supports both the subscription and pay-as-you-go billing methods.
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 starts 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 starts 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 from 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.