Dear Alibaba Cloud users,
On June 11, 2024, the burstable protected traffic feature is officially released for Cloud Firewall that uses the subscription billing method to provide flexible billing and continuous protection for enterprises. Cloud Firewall provides the burstable protected traffic feature to ensure continuous online protection of business for large-scale sales promotion scenarios, protection for major events, or short-term business spikes of enterprises in the cloud, such as business transaction spikes at a specific point in time every day and unexpected business traffic spikes. The feature provides protection for the traffic bandwidth that exceeds the purchased traffic protection bandwidth, which is referred to as excess traffic. The excess traffic is billed based on the pay-as-you-go billing method.
Release date
June 11, 2024
Scenarios
Periodic traffic spikes that last a short period of time, such as a business transaction spike between 9:00 and 9:30 each morning.
Occasional traffic spikes, such as unexpected traffic spikes in business changes or business call changes.
Large-scale sales promotions or protection for major events, such as traffic spikes during Double 11 or attack and defense drills for major events.
Applicable scope
Supported firewalls
Internet firewall
NAT firewalls
Virtual private cloud (VPC) firewalls
Supported editions
Premium Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition
Supported purchase types
New purchase, upgrade, and downgrade
Billing
By default, the burstable protected traffic feature is disabled. If you want to enable the burstable protected traffic feature, set the Burstable Protected Traffic parameter to Yes.
After you enable the burstable protected traffic feature, you are charged USD 0.06 per GB of excess traffic at the Internet boundary, NAT boundary, and VPC boundary. Bills are generated on the next day, and fees can be offset by using pay-as-you-go savings plan. By default, up to 1,000,000 GB of excess traffic can be processed per day. Fees are calculated by using the following formulas:
Fees for traffic on the Internet boundary = (Processed inbound traffic + Processed outbound traffic) × Unit price per GB
Fees for traffic on the NAT boundary = Processed Outbound traffic × Unit price per GB
Fees for traffic on the VPC boundary = (Processed inbound traffic + Processed outbound traffic) × Unit price per GB
You can use the burstable protected traffic feature together with a pay-as-you-go savings plan to reduce costs. For more information, see Pay-as-you-go savings plan.
Incentives
After you enable the burstable protected traffic feature, you can receive a free quota of 10 GB on burstable protected traffic each day. The free quota is applicable to the excess traffic at the Internet boundary, NAT boundary, and VPC boundary.
Discounts are available for pay-as-you-go savings plans on the official website.
Procedures
Enable the burstable protected traffic feature
New user
Go to the Cloud Firewall buy page and set the Burstable Protected Traffic parameter to Yes. After you enable the burstable protected traffic feature, if excess traffic is generated, bills are generated on the next day.
Existing user
Go to the Upgrade page and set Burstable Protected Traffic to Yes to enable the burstable protected traffic feature by upgrading Cloud Firewall. After you enable the burstable protected traffic feature, if excess traffic is generated, bills are generated on the next day. For more information about how to upgrade Cloud Firewall, see Upgrade.
Disable the burstable protected traffic feature
If you no longer require the burstable protected traffic feature, you can disable the feature by downgrading Cloud Firewall. To disable the feature, go to the Downgrade page and set the Burstable Protected Traffic parameter to No. After you disable the burstable protected traffic feature, bills for the current day are generated on the next day.
Billing example
A finance and securities company adds 5 public IP addresses, including 2 public IP addresses of Server Load Balancer (SLB) instances, 2 elastic IP addresses (EIPs) of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, and 1 public IP address of an ECS instance, to the Internet firewall of Cloud Firewall for protection. The company also purchases a protected Internet traffic bandwidth of 10 Mbit/s. The actual peak inbound traffic of the company is 46.26 Mbit/s and the peak outbound traffic is 143.54 Mbit/s in the previous 7 days. The normal peak traffic of daily business is 10 to 20 Mbit/s, which occasionally spikes to 100 to 150 Mbit/s and lasts for more than 10 minutes. Over the previous 7 days, the excess traffic bandwidth was 133.54 Mbit/s, and the total volume of the excess traffic was 167.69 GB.
Monthly fee for excess traffic by scaling out the bandwidth
133.54 Mbit/s × USD 7 per Mbit/s per month = USD 934.78 per month
Monthly fee for excess traffic by using the burstable protected traffic feature
(167.67 GB - 7 × 10 GB) × USD 0.06 per GB = USD 5.86. USD 5.86/7 days × 30 days = USD 25.11. Compared with scaling out the bandwidth, you can save USD 909.67 per month.
Monthly fee by using the burstable protected traffic feature together with a pay-as-you-go savings plan
You can purchase a pay-as-you-go savings plan of USD 80 to enjoy the discounts on the official website or discounts for key accounts, such as a 50% discount for promotions in June.
USD 80 × 50% promotional discount × 95% tiered discount = USD 38. Compared with the fees for excess traffic by scaling out the bandwidth, you can save USD 871.67 per month.
If you have questions, submit a ticket.