Service Mesh is available in several editions with distinct features: Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition. The billing standards vary by edition. This topic describes the billable items and billing methods for Service Mesh.
Billable items
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Mesh management: The Enterprise and Ultimate editions support multiple protocols, dynamic scaling, fine-grained service governance, and a comprehensive zero-trust security framework. These editions also provide enhanced performance and support for large-scale clusters, making it easier to deploy a Service Mesh in a production environment. You are charged a mesh management fee based on the edition of your ASM instance. For pricing details, see Billing of mesh management (pay-as-you-go).
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Cloud product resources: If you use associated Alibaba Cloud services with ASM, you are charged separately for those resources. For pricing details, see Billing of cloud product resources.
Mesh management billing (pay-as-you-go)
ASM instance fee = Unit price of the instance edition × Usage duration (in hours)
The following tables show the unit prices for different editions of ASM instances.
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For more information about the features of each ASM edition, see Functions and features.
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The prices on the product purchase page are final. The prices in this topic are for reference only.
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Pod count rule: ASM calculates the number of pods based on discovered namespaces and automatically excludes system namespaces such as istio-system, arms-prom, kube-node-lease, kube-public, and kube-system.
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Edition |
Pod limit |
Unit price |
Remarks |
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Enterprise Edition |
1,000 pods |
USD 0.98/hour/instance |
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Ultimate Edition |
10,000 pods |
USD 4.63/hour/instance |
Cloud resource billing
The following table describes related Alibaba Cloud services and their billing rules.
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Cloud service |
Type |
Description |
Billing |
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Classic Load Balancer (CLB) |
Yes |
Provides access to the Istio control plane and API server. For more information, see What is Classic Load Balancer. |
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Network Load Balancer (NLB) |
No, but recommended |
In ASM 1.18 and later, you can create a service mesh gateway that uses an NLB instance. For more information, see Use an NLB instance at an ingress gateway. |
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Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) |
Yes |
Used to build the network environment and routing rules for a Service Mesh. For more information, see What is a VPC?. |
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Elastic IP Address (EIP) |
No, but recommended |
Exposes the API server to the internet. For more information, see What is an EIP?. |
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Managed Service for Prometheus |
No, but recommended |
Used to monitor ASM instances and configure alerts based on Prometheus. For more information, see What is Managed Service for Prometheus?. |
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Log Service |
No, but recommended |
Used to collect access logs from ASM gateways and sidecars in the mesh. For more information, see What is Log Service?. |
Billing details
Bill generation
Commercial editions of ASM are billed hourly. Alibaba Cloud calculates your usage from the previous hour, generates a bill, and automatically deducts the amount from your account balance. Bills are typically generated 10 to 30 minutes after the end of a billing cycle. If you upgrade your ASM instance edition, the entire billing cycle is charged at the rate of the upgraded edition. Examples:
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If you upgrade an ASM instance from Enterprise Edition to Ultimate Edition at 10:15:00, the billing cycle from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00 is charged at the Ultimate Edition rate.
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If you create a commercial ASM instance between 10:00:00 and 10:59:59, a bill for the 11:00:00 to 12:00:00 cycle is generated between approximately 12:10:00 and 12:30:00.
Overdue payments and release
If your account balance is insufficient to cover the bill for a commercial ASM instance, the payment becomes overdue. While in an overdue state, you cannot access the Istio control plane or the API server of clusters in the ASM instance, impacting services on the data plane. If the payment is overdue for more than 15 days, Alibaba Cloud will suspend the service and remove the ASM instance (but does not release it). The instance cannot be recovered after it is removed.
Viewing billing details
You can view consumption details for cloud services on the Billing Details page in the Billing Management console. Select a statistical dimension and period to view reports. For more information, see View your Billing Details.