If you run a self-managed Kubernetes cluster in an on-premises data center or on Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, you can use virtual nodes (VNodes) to connect the cluster to Elastic Container Instance (ECI). This topic describes how VNodes are billed.
If you use ECI with Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK), the virtual nodes that are based on Virtual Kubelet and created when you deploy the ack-virtual-node component are free of charge.
Billing
You are charged for each VNode that you create. Each VNode has one resident node and is equivalent to an elastic container instance that provides 2 vCPUs and 8 GiB memory. You are charged based on the equivalent number of instances.
VNodes provide the tagging feature. You can bind tags to VNodes. Then, you can separately calculate the costs of VNodes and elastic container instances based on the tags.
The following formula is used to calculate the price of one VNode: The price of one VNode = (2 × Unit price of vCPUs + 8 × Unit price of memory) × Run duration.
The unit price of a vCPU is USD 0.0000077 per second (USD 0.02772 per hour), and the unit price of memory is USD 0.00000096 per second (USD 0.003456 per hour).
The actual price is subject to the information displayed on your bill. For more information, see ECI instance billing.
The run duration begins once the resident node reaches the Ready state.
The status of the resident node is not the same as that of a node in the cluster. You can check the status of the resident node on the Virtual Node page in the Elastic Container Instance console.