Configure a free trial - Compute Nest - Alibaba Cloud Documentation Center

Service providers can offer a free trial for private services, which allows users to experience the service at no cost. Service providers can also create trial service instances to test their own services.

Overview of the free trial feature

The trial service includes most features of the full service, which allows users to try it for free. Service providers can enable the free trial feature when they create or update a private service.
After a service is configured and published, users can find services with a free trial tag in the Service Catalog or My Services page of the console and try them.
When a trial service instance is created, the required cloud resources are created under an Alibaba Cloud system account. Neither the user nor the service provider is charged.

Important

Trial resources are deployed under an Alibaba Cloud system account. This feature is intended only to verify that cloud resources run successfully and that applications start correctly. You can log on to the instance in ECS and Kubernetes (K8s) scenarios to check. Operations such as exporting the ECS image of a trial instance, viewing specific cloud resource parameters, creating RAM users, or obtaining an AccessKey pair are not supported. You cannot view specific cloud resource parameters because you cannot log on to the console for trial cloud resources. To use more features, create and manage resources under your personal or enterprise account.

Prerequisites

You must be a Compute Nest service provider to enable the free trial feature.

Enable the free trial feature for a service

This section lists only the parameters that require special configuration for the free trial feature. You can configure other parameters as required. For more information about other parameters, see Create a private service and Update a service.

When you create a private service or edit a version and create a new version, navigate to the Create Service or Modify Version page.
Click Add Package.
Change the trial type to Trial Only.
In the package parameters, select the instance type parameter to set a fixed ECS instance type. Users can configure non-package parameters as required.

In the Trial Type column, select Instance Type from the drop-down list and specify the corresponding ECS instance type in the Trial Only column.
Click Create a service. or Save Update, and then click OK in the confirmation dialog box.
The Service Overview area displays information such as the cost of the trial service.
In the Basic Information section, the Trial Status changes to Enabled.

Test the free trial feature of a service

Important

The trial service instance feature applies only to cloud resources that are created using Compute Nest. If a cloud resource is not created using Compute Nest, you must create it manually on a pay-as-you-go basis for testing.

Create a trial service instance

After the service is created or updated, deploy a trial service instance by following these steps.

Go to the Compute Nest - My Services page.
Find the service that has the free trial enabled and click the service card to open its product page.
On the Basic Details tab, click the Free Trial Deployment URL under Service Deployment to create a trial service instance.

The Deployment Method is ROS, and the branch is main.
On the Free Trial page, configure the parameters as needed, and then click Next: Confirm Order.

Connect to a trial service instance to troubleshoot errors

If an error occurs while you are testing a trial service instance, you can remotely connect to the service instance to view detailed error information or perform management operations.

Go to the Compute Nest - Service Instances page. On the details page of the service instance, go to the Resources tab. Find the target ECS instance and click Remote Connection in the Actions column.

If a service provider creates an ACK cluster and needs to connect to it using kubectl, add code to the template to enable the connection. Delete this code after testing is complete. Modify the code based on your current template information and the code comments. Then, add the ClusterUserKubeconfig and ClusterApplicationJob resources to the Resources section of the template. The resource template code is as follows:

Warning

When you delete the resource template code, check it carefully to prevent it from affecting your business.

Example of resource code and usage for a deployed ACK service

Resources:
  ClusterUserKubeconfig:
    Type: DATASOURCE::CS::ClusterUserKubeconfig
    DependsOn:
      - AckOrAcsClusterModule				  # Modify this field based on the specific ACK resource name
    Properties:
      ClusterId:
        Fn::GetAtt:
          - AckOrAcsClusterModule			  # Modify this field based on the specific ACK resource name
          - ClusterId
  ClusterApplicationJob:
    Type: ALIYUN::CS::ClusterApplication
    DependsOn:
      - ClusterUserKubeconfig
    Properties:
      YamlContent:
        Fn::Sub:
          - |
            apiVersion: batch/v1
            kind: Job
            metadata:
              name: kubectl
            spec:
              template:
                metadata:
                  name: kubectl
                spec:
                  restartPolicy: OnFailure
                  containers:
                  - name: intall
                    image: compute-nest-registry.cn-hangzhou.cr.aliyuncs.com/public/dtzar/helm-kubectl:3.12.0
                    command: [ "/bin/sh", "-c", "--" ] 
                    args:
                      - |
                        # Configure kubeconfig information
                        mkdir -p ~/.kube
                        echo '${KubeConfig}' | base64 -d >> ~/.kube/config
                        sleep 3

                        # Keep the job running
                        while true
                           do sleep 300
                        done
          - KubeConfig:
              Fn::Replace:
                - "\n": ''
                - Fn::Base64Encode:
                    Fn::GetAtt:
                      - ClusterUserKubeconfig
                      - Config
      ClusterId:
        Fn::GetAtt:
          - AckOrAcsClusterModule			# Modify this field based on the specific ACK resource name
          - ClusterId
      DefaultNamespace:
        Ref: 'ALIYUN::StackName'

After the resources are created, go to the Compute Nest - Service Instances page. On the details page of the service instance, perform the following operations on the Resources tab:

Find the pod named kubectl and click Remote Connection.

On the service instance details page, click the Resources tab, select the Container Pod Resources subtab, find the pod containing kubectl in the resource list, and click Remote Connection in the Actions column.

After you connect to the pod, you can use kubectl to debug.

kubectl-fpwbr:/config# kubectl get pod
NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
kubectl-fpwbr                 1/1     Running   0          4m46s
spring-boot-76b4fc49bc-bpjtj  1/1     Running   0          4m50s
kubectl-fpwbr:/config#