Economical mode is a cost-saving feature for Elastic Compute Service (ECS) pay-as-you-go and spot instances. When an instance is stopped in this mode, it retains data and configurations while reducing costs. You are no longer charged for computing resources, system-assigned public IP addresses, and image licenses. You are still charged for resources such as system disks, data disks, elastic IP address (EIPs), and snapshots. This topic describes how to stop an instance in economical mode.
When to use economical mode
Cost saving
For an instance stopped in economical mode, the following resources are recycled and no longer billed:
Computing resources, such as vCPUs, memory, GPUs, and FPGAs
System-assigned public IP addresses
Image licenses
The following resources are retained and continue being billed at the pay-as-you-go rates:
System disks
Data disks
EIPs
Snapshots
Requirements
To use economical mode, an ECS instance and its family must meet the following criteria:
It's deployed in a virtual private cloud (VPC). You can migrate ECS instances from the classic network to VPCs.
Its billing method is pay-as-you-go.
The following instance families do NOT support economical mode because they have local storage or persistent memory: all instance families with local SSDs (i series), all big data instance families (d series), and the gn5, re6p, re6p-redis, and ebmre6p instance families.
Considerations
As mentioned in the Cost saving section above, some resources are recycled and no longer billed. This may cause the following issues:
Prepare for interruptions:
After the computing resources are recycled, the instance may fail to be restarted due to the following reasons:
Insufficient resources in the zone. Try restarting the instance later, and there may be resources available.
Overdue payments in your account. Settle your account, and restart the instance.
Alternatively, you can change the instance to an instance type that has available resources.
Your previous system-assigned public IP address that was recycled may no longer be available. If you restart the instance, the system will automatically assign a new public IP address, which may differ from the previous one. The private IP address remains unchanged.
If a price limit was set on the spot instance during its creation, restarting the instance may fail if the market price exceeds the price limit.
If the instance is a burstable instance, the instance stops earning CPU credits and the CPU credit balance is cleared. When you restart the instance, the instance starts earning CPU credits again.
When to use standard mode
In the following scenarios, standard mode is more suitable:
If your applications depend on the instance's current system-assigned public IP address, stop the instance in Standard Mode or convert the public IP address to an EIP.
If you need to restart an instance shortly after stopping it, such as in the following scenarios, then it's better to choose Standard Mode:
How to enable economical mode
There are several ways to stop an instance in economical mode: through the ECS console, using Alibaba Cloud CLI, through Alibaba Cloud Client, and by calling an API operation.
In addition, you can enable Economical Mode by default for all instances within VPCs.
Enable economical mode for an instance
ECS console
In the Actions column on the right of the Instance page, click Stop.
Set the Stop Mode to Economical Mode, then click Confirm.
Alibaba Cloud Client
In the client home page, choose ECS to go to instance list page.
Find the target instance and click Actions in the Actions column on the right.
Choose Change Instance Status and then click Stop Instance.
On the Stop Instance panel, select StopCharging to enable economical mode.
Alibaba Cloud CLI
To stop an instance and enable economical mode, run a command to call the StopInstance operation, setting the StoppedMode parameter as StopCharging.
Refer to the following example to stop an instance that resides in the Singapore region:
aliyun ecs StopInstance \
--RegionId ap-southeast-1 \
--InstanceId i-t4n5xxxxxxxxxxx \
--StoppedMode StopCharging \
--ForceStop false \
--DryRun falseAPI
Support for pay-as-you-go instances and spot instances: Call the StopInstance operation with the StoppedMode parameter set to StopCharging to stop an instance in economical mode.
Support only for spot instances: Call the RunInstances and CreateInstance operations with SpotInterruptionBehavior parameter set to Stop when you create a spot instance. The instance is in economical mode when it is interrupted.
Enable economical mode by default for all instances
You can set instances to stop in Economical Mode by default. This can be done for all instances within VPCs in your account that support this mode.
When you stop an instance in the ECS console, you will see that Economical Mode is already selected for the Stop Mode parameter.
If you use Alibaba Cloud CLI to stop an instance, there is no need to add the
StoppedModeparameter because the default value is alreadyStopCharging.
Even when economical mode is enabled by default, stopping an instance directly from within its operating system (shutting down Windows server through RDP or Linux server through SSH) does not automatically trigger economical mode.
In such cases, trigger economical mode in one of the ways mentioned in How to enable economical mode.
If you have overdue payments, instances will be stopped in economical mode.
Go to ECS console - Overview.
In the upper-right corner of the Overview tab, click Custom Settings.
Turn on Economical Mode.
In the message that appears, read the notes and click Enable Economical Mode in the lower part.
View the stop mode of an instance
After you stop a pay-as-you-go instance, the ECS console shows whether economical mode has been triggered for it.
On the Instance page, find the stopped instance that you want to check, and view the stop mode in the Status column.
After you set an instance to stop in Economical Mode, while it is stopping, the Status column may still show it as being in Standard Mode. Wait until it has fully stopped, then check it again.
References
Spot Instances can be set to automatically Stop in Economical Mode when interrupted. For more information, see Create a spot instance.
Use the scheduled startup and shutdown feature of CloudOps Orchestration Service (OOS) to batch manage the startup and shutdown times of multiple instances. Use this feature in combination with economical mode to further reduce costs.
Do instances equipped with local storage support triggering economical mode?