An overdue payment on your account can affect your workloads. This topic describes the impact of an overdue payment on ACK clusters and their associated cloud services, how to settle overdue bills, and how to prevent overdue payments.
Impact of overdue payments
An overdue payment occurs when your available credit, including your Alibaba Cloud account balance and vouchers, is less than your outstanding bill. Once a payment becomes overdue, Alibaba Cloud sends you notifications by email. To avoid service disruption, top up your account and settle the bill as soon as possible.
The impact of an overdue payment varies depending on the cluster type and the billing methods of the associated cloud services.
Clusters
Cluster type
First 15 days
After 15 days
ACK Pro cluster
The cluster enters an inactive state. In this state, you cannot access the cluster API server, and all operations that require API server access fail. For more information about cluster states, see Cluster lifecycle.
The impact on your workloads also depends on the status of associated cloud services.
ACK stops providing services, removes the corresponding nodes from your cluster (without releasing the associated cloud services), and then deletes the cluster.
After the cluster stops providing services, all Kubernetes resources in your cluster, such as ConfigMaps, Deployments, and Services, are permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.
ACK Basic cluster, ACK dedicated cluster
The cluster state is not affected.
The impact on your workloads depends on the status of associated cloud services.
Associated cloud services
Once a payment becomes overdue, associated cloud services are handled according to their respective overdue payment policies. Typically, subscription resources remain available until they expire. Pay-as-you-go resources may be suspended or released.
For example:
For an ECS instance, if it uses the subscription billing method, Pods on the node are not affected until the subscription expires. If it uses the Pay-as-you-go billing method, the ECS instance is released after being overdue for a certain period, which releases the Pods on the node. For more information, see Overdue payments for ECS.
A CLB instance associated with the API server uses the Pay-as-you-go billing method. After being overdue for a certain period, the CLB instance is released, which makes the cluster unavailable. For more information, see Overdue payments for CLB.
Settle overdue bills
To avoid service disruption, settle your overdue bills as soon as possible.
Go to the Expenses and Costs console. In the notification banner at the top of the Account Overview page, click Pay Now and follow the on-screen instructions to settle the overdue bill.
Prevent overdue payments
Release unused resources
If you no longer need the cloud services associated with your cluster, back up their data and release them promptly to avoid ongoing charges.
Set up balance alerts
Log on to the Expenses and Costs console and set up a balance alert on the Account Overview page. When your available account credit drops below the alert threshold, the system automatically sends a notification.