Overdue payments in ACK can interrupt your cluster operations and cause associated cloud resources to be suspended or released. This topic explains what happens when your account becomes overdue, how to restore normal service by settling outstanding bills, and how to prevent overdue payments from occurring.
Impact of overdue payments
An account is overdue when the available credit — the sum of your Alibaba Cloud account balance and vouchers — falls below the outstanding bill. Alibaba Cloud sends an email notification when your account becomes overdue.
The impact of an overdue payment depends on your cluster type and the billing method of each associated cloud service.
Cluster impact
The following table covers ACK cluster-level behavior only. For the impact on underlying cloud resources such as ECS instances and CLB instances, see Associated cloud service impact.
| Cluster type | Within 15 days overdue | After 15 days overdue |
|---|---|---|
| ACK Pro cluster | The cluster enters an inactive state. API server access becomes unavailable, and any operations that require API server access cannot be performed. For details, see Cluster lifecycle. Business impact depends on the status of associated cloud services. | ACK suspends services, removes nodes from the cluster without proactively releasing associated cloud services, and deletes the cluster. |
| ACK Basic cluster and ACK dedicated cluster | Cluster state remains unaffected. Business impact depends on the status of associated cloud services. | No additional cluster-level impact. |
Associated cloud service impact
After your account becomes overdue, each associated cloud service follows its own overdue payment policy. Subscription resources such as resource plans remain usable until they expire. Pay-as-you-go resources may be suspended or released.
Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances
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Subscription: Pods on the node remain unaffected until the subscription expires.
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Pay-as-you-go: ECS instances are released after a certain overdue period, which causes the pods on those nodes to be released. For details, see ECS overdue payments.
Classic Load Balancer (CLB) instances associated with the API server
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Pay-as-you-go: All CLB instances are billed pay-as-you-go. If payments are overdue for a certain period, CLB instances are released, making the cluster unavailable. For details, see CLB overdue payments.
Settle overdue bills
Log on to Expenses and Costs. In the top notification bar of the Account Overview page, click Pay Now and follow the prompts to settle the overdue bills.
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.
Avoid overdue payments
Release unused resources
If you no longer need the cloud resources associated with your cluster, back them up and delete them promptly to avoid unnecessary charges.
Set monthly spending alerts
Log on to Expenses and Costs and configure a monthly spending alert on the Account Overview page. When your available credit falls below the alert threshold, the system sends a notification automatically.