Alibaba Cloud ACK LINGJUN clusters are a cluster type offered by Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) for Intelligent Computing LINGJUN. They provide a standard Kubernetes service with a fully managed, high-availability control plane and allow you to use LINGJUN compute nodes as worker nodes in a Kubernetes cluster. This topic describes the billing methods, pricing, and other billing details for ACK LINGJUN clusters.
Index
Billing components
The fees for an ACK LINGJUN cluster include cluster management fees, node management fees, and fees for related cloud resources.
Cluster management fees
ACK LINGJUN clusters have the same enterprise-grade features as ACK Pro clusters. These features include a managed, high-availability control plane that ensures cluster stability, reliability, and security. These features meet the needs of large-scale production environments and simplify cluster setup and O&M, which lets you focus on developing and managing containerized applications.
Billable item | Unit price | Billing method | Billing cycle |
Cluster management fee | USD 0.09 per cluster per hour | Pay-as-you-go | Billed hourly. Usage for less than one hour is billed as one hour. |
Node management fees
ACK LINGJUN clusters support the batch addition and management of LINGJUN compute nodes and provide automated O&M capabilities. This simplifies node O&M and provides a management experience consistent with that of ECS nodes. By default, ACK LINGJUN clusters also provide heterogeneous resource scheduling capabilities, such as GPU sharing and topology-aware scheduling, to improve application performance and overall cluster resource utilization. They offer various scheduling policies and task priority queues for tasks such as AI and High-Performance Computing (HPC). This optimizes the scheduling efficiency for AI training and inference tasks and standardizes the management and delivery of AI resources and payloads.
Billable item | Unit price (tiered based on the maximum daily reported data value) | Billing method | Billing cycle | |
Number of GPUs | For 100 or fewer GPUs | USD 1.5625 per GPU-day | Pay-as-you-go Note The system periodically reports the number of GPUs in the cluster nodes. | Billed daily Note The system automatically selects the maximum daily reported value for billing. |
For the portion of GPUs from 101 to 500 | USD 1.25 per GPU-day | |||
For the portion of GPUs from 501 to 1,000 | USD 0.9375 per GPU-day | |||
For more than 1,000 GPUs | USD 0.625 per GPU-day | |||
Cloud resource fees
If you use other Alibaba Cloud resources with your ACK LINGJUN cluster, you are charged for those resources according to their respective billing rules. Each Alibaba Cloud service collects its own fees. No additional cloud resource fees are incurred if you do not use other Alibaba Cloud services.
The following table describes the Alibaba Cloud services that can be used with ACK LINGJUN clusters and provides links to their billing information.
Currently, you can create ACK LINGJUN clusters only in the Intelligent Computing LINGJUN console. The billing support for associated cloud services depends on the information provided in the Intelligent Computing LINGJUN console.
Cloud service | Activation type | Description | Subscription supported | Resource plan supported | Billing information |
ECS | Required | Used to create nodes for ACK clusters. For more information, see What is Elastic Compute Service? | No | No | |
VPC | Required | Used to build the cluster network environment and routing rules. For more information, see What is a virtual private cloud (VPC)? | No | No | |
Classic Load Balancer (CLB) | Required | Used to create load balancers for the cluster. For more information, see What is Classic Load Balancer (CLB)? | No | No | |
Auto Scaling (ESS) | Required | Used to create nodes and implement automatic scaling for the cluster. For more information, see What is Auto Scaling? | No | No | |
Container Registry (ACR) | Recommended | Used for secure hosting and lifecycle management of cloud-native assets. For more information, see What is Container Registry? | Yes Note ACR Enterprise instances only support the subscription billing method. For more information, see Billing of Enterprise instances. | No | |
Elastic IP Address (EIP) | Recommended | Used for communication between cloud resources and the Internet. For more information, see What is an Elastic IP Address? | No | No | |
Simple Log Service (SLS) | Recommended | Used for log collection and retrieval for cluster components and applications. For more information, see What is Simple Log Service? | No | Yes Note For more information, see Purchase a resource plan. Purchase a resource plan that meets your business needs. | |
Alibaba Cloud Prometheus | Recommended | Used for cluster monitoring and alerting based on Prometheus. For more information, see What is Prometheus Monitoring? | Yes | No | |
NAT Gateway | Optional | Used to enable internet access and pull images from the internet for the cluster. For more information, see What is a NAT gateway? | No | Yes Note For more information, see NAT gateway resource plans. Purchase a resource plan that meets your business needs. | |
Object Storage Service (OSS) | Optional | Used to implement an object storage solution for cluster application data based on OSS. For more information, see What is Object Storage Service? | No | Yes Note For more information, see Resource plan purchase guide. Purchase a resource plan that meets your business needs. |
Overdue payments
If your account balance is insufficient to pay your bill, your ACK LINGJUN cluster enters an overdue state. In this state, you cannot access the cluster's API server, but services on the nodes continue to run. If the payment remains overdue for more than 15 days, Alibaba Cloud suspends the service. The corresponding nodes are removed from the cluster but are not released. The ACK LINGJUN managed cluster and its container instances are deleted. Container instances that are released due to cluster deletion cannot be recovered.
Refund policy
The pay-as-you-go billing method does not involve refunds.
Billing cycle
The billing cycle for the cluster management fees of an ACK LINGJUN cluster is one hour. Alibaba Cloud measures your usage from the previous hour, generates a bill, and then deducts the billed amount from your Alibaba Cloud account. Bills are typically generated within 10 to 30 minutes after a billing cycle ends. After a bill is generated, the system automatically deducts the amount from your account if the balance is sufficient. If you create a cluster less than 30 minutes before the top of the hour, you are not billed for that partial hour. For example:
If you create an ACK LINGJUN managed cluster at 10:15:00, the billing cycle ends at 11:00:00. The bill is generated between 11:10:00 and 11:30:00.
If you create an ACK LINGJUN managed cluster at 10:50:00, the billing cycle does not end at 11:00:00. The first billing cycle ends at 12:00:00. The bill is generated between 12:10:00 and 12:30:00.
View bills
Log on to the Container Service for Kubernetes console.
In the top menu bar, click Expenses to go to the Expenses and Costs page.
NoteIf you are logged on with an Alibaba Cloud account, choose in the top menu bar.
In the navigation pane on the left, choose .
The details include product details, consumption type, price, and deduction information. To query bills for an ACK LINGJUN managed cluster, click Product Name, select Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes from the product list, and then select ACK - Lingjun Node Management for Commodity Name.
NoteIn the upper-right corner of the query results list, click the
icon to customize the displayed columns. Click the 
icon to export the list as a CSV file.For more information about billing details, see Billing details.