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What Are EIPs?

An EIP is a static public IP address that can be accessed over the Internet. Bandwidth will be assigned together with an EIP. EIPs can be bound to or unbound from ECSs, BMSs, virtual IP addresses, NAT gateways, or load balancers.

Each EIP can be used by only one cloud resource at a time.

Figure 1 Connecting to the Internet using an EIP

Advantages

An EIP has the following advantages:
  • Flexibility

    EIPs can be flexibly bound to or unbound from ECSs, BMSs, NAT gateways, load balancers, or virtual IP addresses. The bandwidth can be scaled according to service changes.

  • Cost-effective

    Pay-per-use (based on bandwidth usage or amount of traffic) and yearly/monthly billing modes are available. EIPs can use shared bandwidth to lower bandwidth costs. The yearly/monthly billing mode is more cost effective.

  • Easy to use

    EIP binding and unbinding operations are easy to perform, and bandwidth adjustments take effect immediately.

Accessing EIP

You can access the EIP service through the management console or using HTTPS-based APIs.
  • Management console

    You can use the console to perform operations on EIP resources. To access the EIP service, log in to the management console and select Elastic IP from the console homepage.

  • APIs

    If you need to integrate the EIP service provided by the cloud system into a third-party system for secondary development, you can use an API to access the EIP service. For details, see the Elastic IP API Reference.