Pay-per-Use

Scenario

Pay-per-use is applicable to short-term, abrupt, or unpredictable services that cannot be interrupted, such as e-commerce flash sales, temporary testing, and scientific computing.

Billing Items

DMS for Kafka charges you for your Kafka instance and disk storage space. They support pay-per-use billing.

Assume that you plan to purchase a Kafka instance with 300 GB storage space. At the bottom of the Buying a Kafka Instance page, you can view price details, as shown Figure 1.

Figure 1 Example price

The price includes:

• Instance fee: Calculated based on the selected broker flavor and quantity.
• Storage space fee: Calculated based on the selected disk type and total disk storage space (Single broker's storage space × Broker quantity).

Billing Period

A pay-per-use Kafka instance is billed in seconds, and settled on the hour (UTC+8). Once settlement is complete, it enters a new billing period. The billing starts from the time when the Kafka instance is successfully created and ends at the time when the instance is deleted.

For example, if you purchase a pay-per-use Kafka instance at 8:45:30, and delete it at 8:55:00, the billing period is from 8:00:00 to 9:00:00. Fees are generated from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30, and the billing duration is 600 seconds.

Billing Samples

Assume that you purchased a pay-per-use Kafka instance (kafka.2u4g.cluster × 3, high I/O 300 GB total storage space) in AP-Singapore on Apr 18, 2023, 9:59:30. The billing items include the instance (broker flavor and quantity) and storage space (high I/O 300 GB). Then, you delete it on Apr 18, 2023, 10:45:46:

• The first billing period is from 9:00:00 to 10:00:00. Fees are generated from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00. The billing duration is 30 seconds within the period.
• The second billing period is from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00. Fees are generated from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46. The billing duration is 2746 seconds within the period.

You need to pay for each billing period, and Kafka instance resources are charged individually. The billing formula is shown in Table 2. The price of a resource listed in the product pricing details is per hour, so divide it by 3600 to obtain the price for each second.

Figure 2 shows the billing calculation. The prices in the following two pictures are for reference only. Actual prices are subject to Product Pricing Details.

Figure 2 Sample fees calculation of a pay-per-use Kafka instance (AP-Singapore)

Impact on Billing After Specification Change

If you change instance specifications after purchasing a pay-per-use instance, a new order will be generated based on the new specification's price. The old order automatically becomes invalid.

If you change instance specifications within one hour, multiple billing records will be generated. The start time and end time of each billing record correspond to when different specification comes to effect within the hour.

For example, assume that you purchase a pay-per-use instance (kafka.2u4g.cluster × 3) at 9:00:00. You upgrade the instance flavor to kafka.4u8g.cluster × 3 at 9:30:00. Then, two billing records are generated from 9:00:00 to 10:00:00.

• The first billing record corresponds to 9:00:00–9:30:00, based on the price for kafka.2u4g.cluster x 3.
• The second billing record corresponds to 9:30:00–10:00:00, based on the price for kafka.4u8g.cluster x 3.

Arrears Impact

Figure 3 describes the status of each stage of a pay-per-use Kafka instance. After you purchase a Kafka instance, the instance is running properly within the billing period, this period is the valid period; when the automatic billing of a pay-per-use Kafka instance leads to arrears on your account, the account status turns to arrears, and your Kafka instance enters the grace period and retention period accordingly.

Figure 3 Life cycle of a pay-per-use Kafka instance

Arrears Alert

The system will deduct fees for pay-per-use resources in a certain time after each billing period. When your account is in arrears, we will notify the Huawei Cloud account creator by email, SMS, and internal message.

Arrears Impact

• Grace period

  When your account is in arrears due to automatic fee deduction for pay-per-use Kafka instances, the account status turns to arrears. In arrears, the pay-per-use resource continues rendering service but the resource enters the grace period. You need to pay the fees of your pay-per-use resource incurred during the grace period. To view the fees, go to the Billing Center > Overview page. Huawei Cloud will deduct the fees after you top up your account. Pay-per-use Kafka instances in the grace period cannot be restored upon deletion.

• Retention period

  If you do not pay the arrears within the grace period, the resource enters the retention period and its status turns to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on pay-per-use resources in the retention period.

• Permanent release

  If you do not pay the arrears within the retention period, your Kafka instance will be released, and data will be lost. Instances will be deleted permanently upon release.

• For details about the grace period and the retention period, see What Is a Grace Period of Huawei Cloud? How Long Is It? and What Is a Retention Period of Huawei Cloud? How Long Is It?
• For details about topping up your account, see Making Repayments (Postpaid Direct Customers).

Recycle Bin Charging

Pay-per-use instances with recycling policies enabled will be moved to Recycle Bin upon deletion. After that, they will not generate fees, but their storage will.