Updated on 2025-04-17 GMT+08:00

Provisioned Billing

Provisioned billing is a postpaid mode ideal for users who do not want to pay upfront or make long-term commitments, or those requiring stable cost management.

With this mode, you need to estimate read and write throughputs per second required for your application when creating a table. If the actual throughputs of the table exceed the specified values, requests would be throttled.

This section walks you through provisioned billing policies and examples.

Scenarios

Provisioned billing is ideal in scenarios where service traffic is stable or predictable, or more cost control is needed.

Billing Items

Provisioned billing items for KVS are as follows:

Table 1 Billing items

Billing Item

Unit Price

Description

Storage

Standard storage

$0.00045861 USD/GB-hour

You pay for the storage space used by all KV items and indexes you store in KVS.

The billing is on an hourly basis.

Requests

Standard write capacity units (WCUs)

$0.0008648 USD/WCU-hour

put-kv (adding a single KV item), update-kv (updating a single KV item), delete-kv (deleting a single KV item), batch-write-kv (batch writing KV items), and others

Standard read capacity units (RCUs)

$0.000173 USD/RCU-hour

get-kv (querying a single KV item), scan-kv (scanning all the KV items in a table), scan-skey-kv (scanning part of the items by shard key), and others

Billing Cycle

Resource use in KVS is billed on an hourly basis. There are no charges for creating stores or creating, listing, or querying tables. You are billed based on the standard storage and write and read request units in each billing cycle.

A duration of less than an hour is billed as a full hour. For example, assume you store data in KVS at a certain time between 10:00:00 and 11:00:00 on a day, you are billed for the whole hour of this billing cycle for storage.

Billing Formulas

Storage price = Used capacity (GB-hour) × List unit price

Read/write price = Provisioned read/write throughput × List unit price

KVS charges one WCU for 1 KB of KV items written per second and one RCU for 4 KB of KV items read per second. Table 2 shows how to calculate the provisioned throughput.

Table 2 Provisioned throughput calculation

Billing Item

Conversion Formula

Example

Standard WCUs

ROUNDUP(Average KV item size in KB) × KV items written per second + ROUNDUP(Average size of local secondary index items in KB) × Local secondary index items written per second

Assume that your table is expected to process 100 KV items written per second. Each KV item is 10 KB and involves a local secondary index item of 1 KB. The provisioned write throughput is calculated as follows:

ROUNDUP (10 KB/1 KB) × 100 + ROUNDUP (1 KB/1 KB) × 100 = 1,100 WCUs

Standard RCUs

ROUNDUP(Average KV item size in KB/4) × KV items read per second + ROUNDUP(Average size of local secondary index items in KB/4) × Local secondary index items read per second

Assume that your table is expected to process 100 KV items read per second. Each KV item is 10 KB and involves a local secondary index item of 1 KB. The provisioned read throughput is calculated as follows:

ROUNDUP (10 KB/4 KB) × 100 + ROUNDUP (1 KB/4 KB) × 100 = 400 RCUs

  • In an API call, a standard write of less than 1 KB is billed as 1 KB, and a standard read of less than 4 KB is billed as 4 KB.
  • The calculated read or write throughput needs to be rounded up. For example, a KV item write of 1.3 KB is calculated as follows: ROUNDUP (1.3 KB/1 KB) = 2 WCUs. A KV item read of 6 KB is calculated as follows: ROUNDUP (6 KB/4 KB) = 2 RCUs.

Billing Examples

The estimated prices in the following example are only for reference.

Assume that your table occupied 10 GB of storage from 08:00:00 to 09:00:00 on a particular day. And you had 1,000 WCUs in write throughput and 100 RCUs in read throughput provisioned when creating a table. From 8:00:00 to 9:00:00 on the same day, the write requests recorded 900 WCUs, and the query requests recorded 100 RCUs. The billing details for the cycle from 8:00:00 to 9:00:00 are as follows:

Table 3 Billing details

Billing Cycle

Operation

Billing Item

Unit Price

Usage

Price

8:00:00–9:00:00

Storage

Standard storage

$0.00045861 USD/GB-hour

10 GB

10 GB × $0.00045861 USD/GB = $0.0045861 USD

Write

Standard WCUs

$0.0008648 USD/WCU-hour

1,000 WCUs

1,000 WCUs × $0.0008648 USD/WCU-hour = $0.8648 USD

Read

Standard RCUs

$0.000173 USD/RCU-hour

100 RCUs

100 RCUs × $0.000173 USD/RCU-hour = $0.0173 USD

Total

/

/

/

/

$0.8866861 USD

The table usage from 8:00:00 to 9:00:00 costed $0.8866861 USD.

Impact of Arrears

Figure 1 shows the statuses of KVS resources in different periods with provisioned billing. The first period your resources in KVS enter is a validity period, when you can normally use them. If your account goes into arrears, your resources enter a grace period and if no payments are made within the specific time, they enter a retention period.

Figure 1 Lifecycle of KVS resources with provisioned billing

KVS bills resources in each cycle based on the billing items. If bills are not paid when the usage of your expenditure quota reaches or exceeds 100%, your pay-per-use resources enter a grace period.

If bills are not paid during the grace period, your resources enter a retention period and get frozen, meaning you cannot do any operations on them.

If bills are not paid during the retention period, your resources will be deleted, and data cannot be restored.