Alibaba Cloud Function Compute Pricing, Features & Alternatives

Runtime Platform · FaaS

Function Compute covers more ground than a typical functions service. It runs request-driven applications, asynchronous jobs, and GPU workloads without servers to manage. Alibaba gives these workloads different execution models, making that choice part of the application design. On-demand functions can scale from zero, while configured minimum instances stay warm. Rollback and weighted releases use retained versions and aliases.

Best for

Event-driven applications, APIs, data processing, and GPU-backed inference for teams already using Alibaba Cloud services.

Watch out for

Function Compute is closely tied to Alibaba Cloud regions, RAM, EventBridge, OSS, and other proprietary platform services.

Workloads: AI Inference
APIs
Backend Services
Background Workers
Data Processing
Scheduled Jobs
Web Applications
Services: Functions
GPU Compute
Delivery: Managed

Development & Execution

Supported platform capabilities, execution environments, development technologies, deployment models, integrations, and triggers.

Runtimes

Custom Runtime
.NET Runtime
JVM
Node.js

Languages

C#
Go
Java
JavaScript
PHP
Python
TypeScript

Frameworks

Express.js
Spring Boot

Capabilities

Compute Autoscaling
Scale to Zero
Deployment Rollbacks
Deployment Traffic Splitting

Architecture

GPU vendors

NVIDIA

Deployment & packaging

Docker / OCI
Local Emulator
Serverless (Managed Runtime)

Integrations

GitHub
GitLab
Terraform

Triggers

Scheduled Invocation
Database Events
Event Streams
Publish-Subscribe Topics
HTTP Requests
Direct Invocation
Queue Messages
Storage Events

Pricing

Published pricing structure, representative costs, and material billing factors.

Starting Price: USD 0.000020 CU usage tier 1
Primary Billing: Resource based Function Compute CU Usage
Free Trial: First-time users can claim a Function Compute trial quota for three monthly cycles.
Commitment: CU usage is billed hourly with a USD 0.01 minimum hourly charge when a function has usage prepaid CU resource plans are optional.

Function Compute CU Usage

Primary Pricing

CPU-based elastic Function Compute usage is converted to Compute Units and billed in monthly tiers, with usage accumulated independently by region.

Resource	Billing Unit	Price
CU usage tier 1	per CU for the first 100 million CUs per month	USD 0.000020
CU usage tier 2	per CU from 100 million to 500 million CUs per month	USD 0.000017
CU usage tier 3	per CU above 500 million CUs per month	USD 0.000014
Function invocations	per 10,000 invocations	75 CUs
Active CPU and memory CU usage is based on configured resources and duration	per second of configured resources	1 CU per vCPU and 0.15 CU per GB

Free Trial

First-time users can claim a Function Compute trial quota for three monthly cycles.

Function Compute trial quota: 150,000 CUs per cycle for three monthly cycles

Billing Commitment

CU usage is billed hourly with a USD 0.01 minimum hourly charge when a function has usage; prepaid CU resource plans are optional.

Infrastructure & Availability

Where workloads run, how deployment is scoped, and what underlying infrastructure the platform depends on.

Alibaba Cloud Function Compute is available in 21 active public-cloud regions, including nine in mainland China. Australia (Sydney), ap-southeast-2, is decommissioned. Availability of individual features, runtimes, instance types, triggers, and connected services can be narrower than the base regional footprint.

Execution

Single Region
Multi Region

Deployment scope

Regional

Infrastructure providers

Alibaba Cloud

Available regions (21)

Location	Region ID
North America 2 regions
US (Virginia) Active Function Compute region.	us-east-1
US (Silicon Valley) Active Function Compute region.	us-west-1
Europe 2 regions
Germany (Frankfurt) Active Function Compute region.	eu-central-1
UK (London) Active Function Compute region.	eu-west-1
Asia Pacific 7 regions
China (Hong Kong) Hong Kong region; not classified as mainland China.	cn-hongkong
Singapore Active Function Compute region.	ap-southeast-1
Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur) Active Function Compute region.	ap-southeast-3
Indonesia (Jakarta) Active Function Compute region.	ap-southeast-5
Thailand (Bangkok) Active Function Compute region.	ap-southeast-7
Japan (Tokyo) Active Function Compute region.	ap-northeast-1
South Korea (Seoul) Active Function Compute region.	ap-northeast-2
China Mainland 9 regions
China (Hangzhou) Mainland-China Function Compute region.	cn-hangzhou
China (Shanghai) Mainland-China Function Compute region.	cn-shanghai
China (Qingdao) Mainland-China Function Compute region.	cn-qingdao
China (Beijing) Mainland-China Function Compute region.	cn-beijing
China (Zhangjiakou) Mainland-China Function Compute region.	cn-zhangjiakou
China (Hohhot) Mainland-China Function Compute region.	cn-huhehaote
China (Ulanqab) Mainland-China Function Compute region.	cn-wulanchabu
China (Shenzhen) Mainland-China Function Compute region.	cn-shenzhen
China (Chengdu) Mainland-China Function Compute region.	cn-chengdu
Middle East & Africa 1 region
SAU (Riyadh - Partner Region) Active Function Compute partner region.	me-central-1