Billing Items

Cloud Container Engine (CCE) is free of charge. You only pay for the resources (such as nodes) created when you are using CCE. There are two types of billing items:

1. Clusters: The cluster fee is the cost of resources used by master nodes. The fee varies with the cluster type and cluster size. Cluster types include VM cluster and BMS cluster (the number of master nodes determines whether a cluster is highly available). Cluster size (also called management scale) indicates the maximum number of nodes allowed in a cluster.
   

   The management scale indicates the number of ECSs or BMSs in a cluster.

   For more details, see CCE Pricing Details.

2. IaaS resources: The cost of IaaS resources created to run worker nodes in your cluster is billed. IaaS resources, which are created either manually or automatically, include ECSs, EVS disks, EIPs, bandwidth, and load balancers.

   For more pricing details, see Product Pricing Details.

Billing Modes

CCE is billed on a pay-per-use or yearly/monthly basis.

• Pay-per-use: It is a pay-after-use mode. Billing starts when a resource is provisioned and stops when the resource is deleted. You can use cloud resources as required and stop paying for them when you no longer need them. There is no upfront payment for excess capacity.
  

  The following are pricing principles in the case of CCE cluster hibernation or node shutdown. Note that there are many types of cluster nodes and ECS is used as an example.

  • Cluster hibernation: After a cluster is hibernated, the billing of resources used by master nodes will stop.
  • Node shutdown: Worker node billing stops when the node is stopped. Note that hibernating a cluster will not stop worker nodes in the cluster. To stop an ECS, log in to the ECS console. For details, see Stopping a Node.

    The operation of stopping an ECS is free of charge. After a pay-per-use ECS without local disks or FPGAs is stopped, the ECS, its vCPUs, memory, and images are not billed. However, other resources used by the ECS, such as EVS disks, EIPs, and bandwidth, are still billed. The vCPU and memory resources of the stopped ECS are reclaimed. When the ECS is restarted, the vCPU and memory resources must be requested again. However, if the resources are insufficient, the restart may fail. To avoid a restart failure, wait for several minutes before attempting another restart or modify the ECS specifications. After an ECS with local hard disks (such as enhanced disks and GPUs) and FPGAs is stopped, ECS billing continues and resources such as vCPUs and memory are retained. For details, see ECS Billing.

• Yearly/monthly: It is a pay-before-use mode. Yearly/monthly billing provides a more significant discount than pay-per-use and is recommended for long-term use of cloud services. When you purchase a yearly/monthly package, the system will deduct the package cost from your cloud account based on the chosen specifications.
• Billing mode change: The billing mode cannot be changed within the billing cycle.

• Clusters follow a tiered pricing plan. Pricing for each tier varies with cluster size and type.
• Once a monthly/yearly subscription has expired or a pay-per-use resource becomes in arrears, HUAWEI CLOUD provides a period of time during which you can renew the resource or top up your account. Within the grace period, you can still access and use your cloud service. For details, see Grace Period and Retention Period.

Configuration Changes

From pay-per-use to yearly/monthly billing: You can change the cluster billing mode from pay-per-use to yearly/monthly billing. After the change, master nodes, worker nodes, and cloud resources (such as EVS disks and EIPs) used by your cluster will all be billed on a yearly/monthly basis and a new order will be generated. The nodes and cloud resources will be ready for use immediately after you pay for the new order.

From yearly/monthly billing to pay-per-use: Clusters billed on a yearly/monthly basis cannot change to pay-per-use within the billing cycle. Note that pay-per-use clusters can be directly deleted, but clusters billed on a yearly/monthly basis cannot be deleted. To stop using the clusters billed on a yearly/monthly basis, go to the Billing Center and unsubscribe from them.

Notes

• Cash coupons will not be returned after you downgrade specifications of the cloud servers that are purchased using cash coupons.
• You will need to pay the price difference between the original and new specifications after upgrading cloud server specifications.
• Downgrading cloud server specifications (the amount of CPU or memory resources) will impair cloud server performance.
• If you downgrade cloud server specifications and then upgrade it to the original specifications, you will still need to pay the price difference incurred by the upgrade.