If your account is in a state of overdue payment, it will affect your business operations. This topic describes the impact of overdue payments on Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) clusters and their associated cloud services, the steps to settle outstanding bills, and solutions to avoid overdue payments.
Impact of overdue payments
An account is considered overdue when the available credit, which includes the Alibaba Cloud account balance and vouchers, falls below the outstanding bill. When a payment is overdue, Alibaba Cloud will notify you through email. Top up and settle the overdue bill promptly to prevent business disruptions.
The impact of overdue payments varies based on the cluster type and the billing method of the associated Alibaba Cloud services. The following table describes the details:
Cluster
Cluster type
Overdue less than 15 days
Overdue more than 15 days
ACK Pro cluster
The cluster enters an inactive state. At this time, access to the cluster API server is unavailable, and any operations involving API server access cannot be executed. For more information about cluster states, see Cluster lifecycle.
In addition to changes in cluster state, whether the business is affected depends on the status of the cloud services associated with the cluster after the payment becomes overdue.
ACK suspends services, removes nodes from your cluster without proactively releasing associated cloud services, and deletes the cluster.
ACK Basic cluster and ACK dedicated cluster
The cluster state remains unaffected.
Whether the business is affected depends on the status of the cloud services associated with the cluster after the payment becomes overdue.
Alibaba Cloud services associated with the cluster
After the payment becomes overdue, the cloud services associated with the cluster will be handled according to the overdue payment policy of each product. Normally, cloud resources that are billed in the subscription method, such as resource plans, remain usable until expiration, while pay-as-you-go resources may be suspended or released.
Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances:
Subscription: Pods on the node remain unaffected until the subscription expires.
Pay-as-you-go: The ECS instances will be released after a certain period of overdue payment, which leads to the pods on the node being released. For more information, see ECS overdue payments.
Classic Load Balancer (CLB) instances associated with API server:
Pay-as-you-go: All CLB instances are billed in the pay-as-you-go method. If payments are overdue for a certain period, the CLB instances will be released, which leads to the cluster becoming unavailable. For more information, see CLB overdue payments.
Settle overdue bills
To avoid business interruptions, top up your account and settle the bills promptly after an account becomes overdue.
You can log on to the Expenses and Costs. In the top notification bar of the Account Overview page, click the Pay Now button, and settle the overdue bills as prompted.
How to avoid overdue payments
Release unused resources
If you no longer need the cloud resources associated with your cluster, we recommend that you back them up and delete them promptly to avoid unnecessary charges.
Set monthly spending alerts
Log on to the Expenses and Costs and configure a monthly spending alert on the Account Overview page. When your available account credit falls below the alert threshold, the system will automatically send a notification.