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Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh:Associate an EIP with the ASM control plane

Last Updated:Mar 11, 2026

When a data plane cluster runs in a virtual private cloud (VPC) that cannot communicate with the VPC of your Service Mesh (ASM) instance, the control plane and data plane have no network path between them. Associate an elastic IP address (EIP) with the control plane to expose the ports of the control plane over the Internet, allowing remote data plane clusters to reach the control plane. Disassociate the EIP when Internet access is no longer needed.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure that you have:

Associate an EIP in the ASM console

  1. In the ASM console, click the target instance name to open the ASM instance management console.

  2. In the left-side navigation pane, choose ASM Instance > Base Information.

  3. In the Basic Information section, click Bind EIP next to Istio Pilot Endpoint. To replace an existing EIP, click Replace EIP instead.

  4. In the Bind EIP dialog box, select an idle EIP from the Select an existing EIP drop-down list and click OK.

Disassociate an EIP in the ASM console

Note

After disassociation, the control plane is no longer reachable from the public Internet. Make sure that the data plane cluster has an alternative network path, such as VPC peering or a VPN connection.

  1. In the ASM console, click the target instance name to open the ASM instance management console.

  2. In the left-side navigation pane, choose ASM Instance > Base Information.

  3. In the Basic Information section, click Unbind EIP next to Istio Pilot Endpoint.

  4. In the Unbind EIP dialog box, click OK.

Associate or disassociate an EIP by using the API

Use the ModifyPilotEipResource operation to manage the EIP association programmatically. You can call this operation in OpenAPI Explorer.

Associate or replace an EIP

  1. Prepare an idle EIP. If you do not have one, see Apply for an EIP.

  2. Call the ModifyPilotEipResource operation with the following parameters:

    ParameterValue
    ServiceMeshIdThe ID of the ASM instance
    OperationBindEip
    EipIdThe ID of the EIP

    If an EIP is already associated with the control plane, this call disassociates the existing EIP and associates the specified one.

Disassociate an EIP

Call the ModifyPilotEipResource operation with the following parameters:

ParameterValue
ServiceMeshIdThe ID of the ASM instance
OperationUnBindEip
EipIdDo not specify this parameter

What to do next

  • If Internet exposure is temporary, set up VPC peering or a VPN connection for long-term private connectivity, and then disassociate the EIP.