This topic provides answers to commonly asked questions about Auto Scaling billing.
- Do I need to pay for Auto Scaling?
- Why are all my ECS instances released immediately after a payment in my account becomes overdue?
- Am I still charged for ECS instances in a scaling group after the scaling group is disabled?
Do I need to pay for Auto Scaling?
Auto Scaling is free of charge. For example, you are not charged for activating Auto Scaling or creating scaling groups. However, you must pay for the resources of other Alibaba Cloud services used in Auto Scaling, such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Server Load Balancer (SLB), and ApsaraDB for RDS instances.
Why are all my ECS instances released immediately after a payment in my account becomes overdue?
Auto Scaling performs health checks on ECS instances. If an ECS instance is not in the running state, Auto Scaling considers the instance to be unhealthy. Auto Scaling automatically removes the unhealthy instance from the scaling group, or even releases it. For more information, see ECS instance lifecycle.
Am I still charged for ECS instances in a scaling group after the scaling group is disabled?
Yes, you are still charged for the ECS instances in a scaling group after the scaling group is disabled. You are charged not for the scaling group but for the ECS instances in the scaling group. If ECS instances still exist in the disabled scaling group, you must continue to pay for these instances.