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Documentation > Virtual Machines > Overview of instance voucher

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Instance Voucher Overview

Instance vouchers are another payment method for computing instances. After prepaying the vouchers monthly/yearly at a price close to the price for yearly/monthly package pay-in-advance billing, the vouchers can be used for fee deduction for computing instances (virtual machine instance, container instance, and POD instance) billed by configuration.

Instance vouchers decouple the payment and resource creation, which determines the characteristics of instances that can be deducted, not limited to a specific instance or certain instances. Therefore, it can meet not only the economic considerations when long-term resource use is scheduled, but also the needs of maintaining flexibility in resource creation and deletion.

Instance Voucher Categories

From the perspective of applicable instance types, they can be divided into Cloud virtual machine instance voucher, Container instance voucher and POD instance voucher:

Cloud virtual machine instance vouchers: Credits applicable to per-configuration billing cloud virtual machine instances
Container instance voucher: Credits applicable to per-configuration billing container instances
POD instance voucher: Credits applicable to per-configuration billing POD instances

From the perspective of whether the resources are reserved, can be divided into ** no resource reservation type** and ** resource reservation type** two categories (reserved type for the public test phase, if you need to buy, please contact customer service)

	No resource reservation type	Resource reservation type
Purchase method	Specify geographic region, buy by specification family and computing power ¹	Specify geographic region and available area, buy by specification and quantity
How to use	Configurable per-configuration billing instances with matching ² in any available zone in the same locale	Configurable per-configuration billing instances with matching specifications in the same locale in the same available zone can be used
Resource reservation	Without reservation, if resources are in short supply, there may be situations where instances with sold-out specifications cannot be created, resulting in a waste of coupons.	With reservations, resources are reserved according to the specifications and quantities purchased to ensure that no matter how the resources are sold, at least the coupons will be sold. Instances of the specifications and quantities purchased with coupons can be created

Comparison of calculation instances purchase methods

Instance vouchers are a new way to purchase resources used in conjunction with per-configuration billing instances. Several purchase options are compared as follows:

Billing based on pay by configuration: Postpaid, instance basic billing method, regular billing deductions, resources can be deleted at any time. For deployments of operations that run for short periods of time or periodically but with a short total monthly run time;
Annual and monthly billing packages: Prepaid, instance discounted billing method, commit to a certain length of use (months/years) to receive a discount relative to per-configuration billing pricing, but only one instance is allowed to fulfill the committed length of time, and the instance cannot be deleted before it expires. For instances that run for a long time without the need to delete rebuilds;
Instance vouchers: Prepaid, a kind of voucher, is used with per-configuration billing instances to get a discount relative to per-configuration billing pricing after committing to a certain length of use (months/years), allowing any instance that meets the requirements to use the voucher, and since there is no limit to per-configuration instance deletion, it is equivalent to getting both the discount of annual and monthly billing methods and the flexibility of resource creation and deletion.

Notification:

If you are currently deploying a business based on K8S or using elastic scaling services, and the instances in the cluster need to be frequently deleted-created for resizing due to policies, it is recommended that you evaluate the uptime of the virtual machines in the cluster and consider using instance vouchers to get more price discounts;

If you are currently using annual monthly instances and have no need to remove the resizing, it is not recommended that you resize to the instance voucher + per-configuration billing instance model. Because the instance voucher does not currently support resource reservation, in case of resource constraint, the instance may not be created successfully again after deletion due to insufficient resources.

Types of specifications supported for purchase

Note:

* Generic Shared, Compute Optimized Shared, Bare Metal and GPU Virtualized specifications do not support the purchase of instance vouchers at this time;

* Since the specifications of instances are sold in different regions, there are also regional differences in the specification families supported by the instances vouchers, please refer to the purchase page for the specific specification families available in each region;

If you want to reserve a certain amount of resources by purchasing these vouchers, you can either purchase the instances first or purchase the vouchers first;

Please make sure to check the specifications of the built instances and pay attention to the sold-out status of the planned instances before purchasing the vouchers.

Resource reservation type

The resource reserved instance vouchers can be purchased after specifying the region, availability zone, specifications, and quantity. The price of a single reserved instance is the same as the price of the purchased instance, and most specifications in the host/native container are available for sale.

Instance specifications are detailed in: Cloud virtual machine Instance Specification and Container/POD Specification price-overview)
For details on the pricing and billing rules of the instance voucher, see: Pricing/Billing-Rules

No resource reservation type

No resource reservation type instance voucher, after specifying the locale, applicable product and specification family, is purchased by computing power ¹. The specification families currently supported for sale and the specifications that do not support the use of instance voucher deduction are listed below:

Instance specifications are detailed in: Cloud virtual machine Instance Specification and Container/POD Specification price-overview)
For details on the pricing and billing rules of the instance voucher, see: Pricing/Billing-Rules

c.n3 c.c2 m.n3 h.g2 s.i3

On-Sale Specification FamilySpecifications that do not support creditingMainframe available for purchaseContainers/PODs available for purchasePurchase unit conversions
General Standards	g.n3	--	√	×	1 computing power = 1 core
	g.n2	--	√	√
	g.n1	g.n1.xlarge_m	√	√
Computational Optimization - Standard	--	√	×
	c.n2	--	√	√
	c.n1	c.n1.medium,c.n1.xlarge_m,c.n1.2xlarge_s, c.n1.2xlarge_m,c.n1.4xlarge_m	√	√
Computational optimization-intensive	--	√	×
Memory Optimization - Standard	--	√	×
	m.n2	--	√	√
	m.n1	m.n1.medium	√	√
High Frequency Computing - General	--	√	√
High Frequency Computing - General	h.g1	--	√	×
Storage Optimization - IO	s.i3.22xlarge	√	×
Storage Optimization - IO	s.i1	--	√	×
Storage Optimization - Big Data	s.d2	s.i3.22xlarge	√	×
GPU-Standard	p.n1p40	--	√	×	1 computing power = 1 GPU card
	p.n1p40h	--	√	×
	p.n1v100	--	√	×

Quota

Reserved type (No such specifications available at this time)

	Non-GPU specs (1 compute power = 1 core)		GPU Specifications (1 computing power = 1 card)
	Reserved type	No set-aside type	No set-aside type
Virtual Machines	500 computing power/geography	500 computing power/geography	100 computing power/territory	100 computing power/territory
Native Container	500 computing power/geography	500 computing power/geography	(No such specifications available at this time)
POD	500 computing power/geography	500 computing power/geography	(No such specifications available at this time)

To upgrade your quota please submit a work order.

Crediting rules

After you successfully purchase an instance voucher, the system will convert the voucher into quantifiable compute volume based on the instance specification family, compute power ¹, according to the billing period (1 hour) of the per-configuration billing instance ³ (available compute per hour: Calculated Power* 3600s) for deduction in billing per configuration instance;<br
Whenever a per-configuration billing instance is settled (whole settlement or deleted settlement), it will determine whether there is an available instance voucher for that specification (attributes such as locale, (available zone), specification family, expiration date, etc.), and if so, it will calculate the amount of calculations consumed by the instance and deduct the amount of calculations available in this settlement cycle, and if there is no available instance voucher, it will be settled by normal deduction;
If only a portion of the instance consumption is available for deduction during the current billing cycle, the remaining uncredited volume will be prorated based on specification pricing: Specification unit price / (specification size * 3600s) * (instance consumption calculation amount - has been offset calculation amount), offset record view way please refer to the document view offset details;
Instance vouchers are not accrued or refunded for each hour of available computing, whether or not they are fully credited by the instance;
If an instance has both unreserved and reserved instance vouchers available at the time of crediting, the reserved instance voucher will be credited first.

Notes

Computational power: A metric that reflects the computing power of a single-instance or multi-instance cluster within the same specification family. Compute power = ∑ spec size x number (spec size is a measure of spec compute power within the same spec family, CPU spec is usually equal to the number of cores, GPU spec is usually equal to the number of GPU cards), e.g. if you have 2 instances of 2C8G and 2 instances of 4C16G under your generic standard second generation spec family g.n2, the compute power of 4 instances under that spec family is 2 x 2 + 4 x 2 = 12; & lt;br>

There are individual specifications in the no-resource-reserved instance voucher that are not covered by the credit, as detailed above: Type of specifications supported for purchase;<br

Calculation volume: The number of computational tasks that can be performed by a certain computational power in a certain time period, = computational power * duration (seconds). For instance, if one g.n2.large instance runs for one hour, its computation volume is 1×2×3600.