Microservices Engine:Billing overview of common instances

Billable items

You are charged for common cloud-native gateways managed by MSE. Cloud-native gateways use Alibaba Cloud Server Load Balancer (SLB) instances as Ingresses to meet requirements for different gateway environments. You can associate one or more Internet-facing or internal-facing SLB instances with a cloud-native gateway based on your business requirements.

After the cloud-native gateways are commercialized, if you purchase an SLB instance based on the selected specifications for a new common cloud-native gateway, the fees of the purchased SLB instance is automatically deducted from the balance of your Alibaba Cloud account. The fees of the SLB instance are not included in MSE fees.

Billing methods and cycles

• Pay-as-you-go: If you use the pay-as-you-go billing method, you must select the instance specifications and number of nodes based on your business requirements. The billing duration is measured in hours. If a gateway runs for less than one hour, the usage duration is considered one hour. Fees are calculated every hour and a bill is generated at an interval of 24 hours. Fees are automatically deducted from the balance of your Alibaba Cloud account. The time when bills are generated is determined by the system.

• Subscription: If you use the subscription billing method, you must select the instance specifications and the number of nodes based on your business requirements. The billing duration is measured in months. If the duration that you select is 1 year, the total fees are fees for 1 month multiplied by 12. Fees are automatically deducted from the balance of your Alibaba Cloud account. The time when bills are generated is determined by the system.

Billing formulas

Gateway fees

• Common cloud-native gateways support two types of billing methods: pay-as-you-go and subscription. The billable items include the instance specifications (CPU cores and memory) and number of nodes.

• Cloud-native gateways support auto scaling. You can configure a period for auto scaling to better cope with traffic surges. For the elastic nodes that are automatically scaled out, the system separately generates costs for such nodes on a pay-as-you-go basis. The unit price for elastic nodes is higher than the unit price for common pay-as-you-go nodes. In the billing details, the fees generated for elastic nodes of cloud-native gateways are separately listed.