Service Mesh (ASM) provides the following editions that support different features and capabilities: Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition. Standard Edition is a free edition, and Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition are commercial editions. The billing methods vary depending on the edition. This topic describes the billable items and billing methods of ASM instances.
Billable items
Mesh management: Compared with Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition support more protocols, enhance dynamic extension capabilities, provide fine-grained service governance, and improve the zero-trust security system. In addition, Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition enhance performance, provide better support for large-scale clusters, and simplify the use of ASM instances in production environments. The mesh management fee varies with your edition of ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of mesh management (pay-as-you-go).
Alibaba Cloud services: You are charged for Alibaba Cloud services that are used together with ASM instances. For more information, see Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services.
Billing of mesh management (pay-as-you-go)
ASM instance fee = Unit price for a specific instance edition × Usage duration (hours)
The following table describes the unit prices for different editions of ASM instances.
For more information about the features supported by different editions of ASM instances, see Functions and features.
The prices provided in this topic are for reference only. The actual prices are subject to the buy page.
ASM calculates the number of pods based on the namespaces that are detected during service discovery and automatically excludes the following system namespaces: istio-system, arms-prom, kube-node-lease, kube-public, and kube-system.
Edition | Maximum number of supported pods | Unit price | Remarks |
Standard Edition | 50 pods Note We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments. | Free of charge | We recommend that you do not use this edition in production environments. |
Enterprise Edition | 1,000 pods | USD 0.98 per hour per ASM instance |
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Ultimate Edition | 10,000 pods | USD 4.63 per hour per ASM instance |
Billing of related Alibaba Cloud services
The following table describes the billing of other Alibaba Cloud services that you create when you use ASM.
Alibaba Cloud service | Required | Description | Billing rule |
Classic Load Balancer (CLB) | Yes | This service is used to access the Istio control plane and API server. For more information, see What is SLB? | |
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | Yes | This service is used to build a network environment and create routing rules for ASM instances. For more information, see What is a VPC? | |
Elastic IP Address (EIP) | No, but recommended | This service is used to expose the API server to the Internet. For more information, see What is an Elastic IP Address? | |
Managed Service for Prometheus | No, but recommended | This service is used to monitor ASM instances and generate alerts when exceptions are detected. For more information, see What is Managed Service for Prometheus? | |
Simple Log Service | No, but recommended | This service is used to collect access logs of ASM gateways and sidecar proxies in ASM instances. For more information, see What is Simple Log Service? |
Billing rules
Bill generation
The billing cycle of an ASM instance of a commercial edition is 1 hour. Alibaba Cloud calculates the fee for using the instance and generates a bill on an hourly basis. A bill is issued within 10 to 30 minutes after the current billing cycle ends. After a bill is generated, Alibaba Cloud automatically deducts the amount of the bill from the balance of your Alibaba Cloud account if your account balance is sufficient. If you update an ASM instance to an advanced edition during a billing cycle, the instance is billed for this billing cycle based on the pricing of the advanced edition. Examples:
If you update an ASM instance from Enterprise Edition to Ultimate Edition at 10:15:00, the instance is billed for the billing cycle that lasts from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00 based on the pricing of Ultimate Edition.
If you create an ASM instance of a commercial edition in the period from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00 (excluding 11:00:00), the instance is billed for the billing cycle that lasts from 11:00:00 to 12:00:00. The bill for this billing cycle is generated between 12:10:00 and 12:30:00.
Overdue payment and instance release
If your Alibaba Cloud account does not have a sufficient balance to pay an ASM instance of a commercial edition, the payment for the ASM instance becomes overdue. In this case, you cannot access the Istio control plane or the API server of the clusters that are added to the ASM instance. In addition, services that run in the clusters on the data plane are affected. If you do not pay the overdue bill within 15 days after the overdue date, Alibaba Cloud stops providing the ASM service for you and removes the ASM instance from the console. However, Alibaba Cloud does not release the ASM instance. The ASM instance cannot be recovered after it is removed.
View billing and usage details
On the Bill Details page, click the Billing Details tab to view consumption information. You can select different statistical dimensions and statistical periods to view reports in specific dimensions. For more information, see Billing details.