Economical mode for pay-as-you-go instances (including spot instances)

When you stop an instance in economical mode, the following actions occur:

• Released resources: The instance's vCPUs, memory, GPUs, FPGAs, and system-assigned public IP address are released. Billing for these resources and the image license stops.

• Retained resources: The instance's cloud disks (system disk and data disks), snapshots associated with the cloud disks, and private IP address are retained.

For more information, see Differences between economical mode and standard stop mode.

Impact and risks

The cost savings of economical mode stem from its resource-release mechanism, which also introduces risks. Carefully evaluate whether these risks are acceptable for your workload:

Requirements

To use economical mode, an ECS instance must meet all of the following conditions:

• Billing method: pay-as-you-go (including spot instances).

• Network type: Only instances in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) are supported. Instances in the classic network are not supported.

• Instance specification:

  • Must not have local disks. For example, Big Data (d-series) and Local SSD (i-series) instance families are not supported. You can check the Local Storage column in Instance families to see if an instance family includes local disks.

  • Must not have persistent memory. For example, re6p and re6p-redis instance families are not supported. You can check the Persistent Memory column in Instance families to see if an instance family includes persistent memory.

Stop an instance in economical mode

aliyun ecs StopInstance \
--RegionId cn-hangzhou \
--InstanceId i-t4n5xxxxxxxxxxx \
--StoppedMode StopCharging \
--ForceStop false \
--DryRun false

Set economical mode as the default

By default, Standard Mode is selected when you stop an instance in the console. You can change this setting to make Economical Mode the default choice.

This setting changes only the default option in the console. When you stop an instance, you can still choose to stop the instance by using Standard Mode.

1. Go to the ECS console - Overview page.

   To configure this setting, switch the ECS console to the standard version.

2. On the right side of the page in the Common Features section, click Custom Settings.

3. Turn on the Economical Mode switch.

4. Read the notification and, after confirming the details, click Enable Economical Mode at the bottom of the page.

Usage in production environments

For large or periodically used clusters, use Operation Orchestration Service (OOS) to schedule instances to automatically stop in economical mode. This approach automates cost optimization without manual intervention.

• Use case: A batch of ECS instances is used as a development and test environment. These instances are typically used only during business hours on weekdays (for example, 09:00 to 18:00). At night and on weekends, these instances are idle but continue to incur charges.

• Solution: Use Alibaba Cloud's Operation Orchestration Service (OOS) to create a scheduled start and stop task. This task automatically places instances in the most cost-effective state when not in use, which helps save costs. The key configurations are as follows:

  • Execution schedule: Monday to Friday

  • Start time: 09:00

  • Stop time: 18:00

  • Stop mode: economical mode

Economical mode vs. standard mode

The main differences between economical mode and standard stop mode are as follows: