This topic describes the billing rules of Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) Pro clusters, including the billable items, overdue payments, and billing cycle.
Billable items
No cluster management fee or node management fee is charged for ACK Basic clusters. Only cloud service fee is charged. ACK Basic clusters can meet the learning and testing needs of individual users. We recommend that you use ACK Pro clusters in the production environment.
Cluster management fee
The cluster management fee varies based on the cluster type. ACK clusters are integrated with the virtualization, storage, networking, and security capabilities of Alibaba Cloud. These capabilities facilitate the management of high-performance and scalable applications that are deployed in ACK clusters. These capabilities also simplify the operations that are required for creating or scaling clusters. This way, you can focus on the development and management of containerized applications.
The cluster management fee is charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. ACK charges you USD 0.09/hour per cluster.
Cloud service fee
You are charged for Alibaba Cloud services that are used by your ACK Pro cluster. These cloud services are billed based on their billing rules.
Alibaba Cloud service | Activation | Description | Subscription | Resource plan | Billing description |
Elastic Compute Service (ECS) | Required | This service can be used to create nodes in ACK clusters. For more information, see What is ECS? | Supported | Unsupported | |
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | Required | This service can be used to build networks and create routing rules for clusters. For more information, see What is a VPC? | Unsupported | Unsupported | |
Classic Load Balancer (CLB) | Required | This service provides load balancing for ACK clusters. For more information, see What is CLB? | Unsupported | Unsupported | |
Auto Scaling | Required | This service enables ACK clusters to support auto scaling and automatically creates nodes in scale-out activities. For more information, see What is Auto Scaling? | Unsupported | Unsupported | |
Container Registry | Recommended | This service ensures the security of cloud-native applications that are fully managed on the cloud and allows you to manage the lifecycle of these applications. For more information, see What is Container Registry? | Supported Note Container Registry Enterprise Edition instances support only the subscription billing method. For more information, see Billing of Container Registry Enterprise Edition instances. | Unsupported | |
Elastic IP Address (EIP) | Recommended | This service enables Internet access for cloud resources. For more information, see What is an Elastic IP Address? | Unsupported | Unsupported | |
Elastic Container Instance | Recommended | This service is used to host workloads in ACK clusters. For more information, see What is Elastic Container Instance? | Unsupported | Unsupported | |
Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh (ASM) | Recommended | This service allows you to manage the network traffic of applications in multiple ACK clusters by using service meshes. For more information, see What is ASM? | Unsupported | Supported | |
Simple Log Service | Recommended | This service allows you to collect and query the log data of ACK components and applications. For more information, see What is Simple Log Service? | Unsupported | Supported Note For more information about how to select resource plans based on your business requirements, see Purchase a resource plan. | |
CloudMonitor | Recommended | This service allows you to monitor the status of nodes and applications in ACK clusters. For more information, see What is CloudMonitor? | Unsupported | Supported | - |
Managed Service for Prometheus | Recommended | This service allows you to monitor ACK clusters and generate alerts when exceptions are detected. For more information, see What is Managed Service for Prometheus? | Supported | Unsupported | |
NAT Gateway | Optional | This service enables ACK clusters to communicate with the Internet and pull images over the Internet. For more information, see What is NAT Gateway? | Unsupported | Supported Note For more information about how to select resource plans based on your business requirements, see NAT resource plans. | |
Security Center (SAS) | Optional | This service allows you to monitor the security events of application runtimes in ACK clusters and generate alerts when exceptions are detected. For more information, see What is Security Center? | Unsupported | Unsupported | |
Apsara File Storage NAS (NAS) | Optional | This service allows you to store application data in NAS file systems. For more information, see What is NAS? | Unsupported | Supported Note For more information about how to select resource plans based on your business requirements, see Purchase resource plans. | Billing of General-purpose NAS file systems and Billing of Extreme NAS file systems |
Object Storage Service (OSS) | Optional | This service allows you to store application data in OSS buckets. For more information, see What is OSS? | Unsupported | Supported Note For more information about how to select resource plans based on your business requirements, see Purchase resource plans. | |
Key Management Service (KMS) | Optional | This service allows you to manage application Secrets and encrypt Secrets for ACK Pro clusters. For more information, see What is Key Management Service? | Unsupported | Unsupported | |
Cloud Backup | Optional | This service provides data backup, disaster recovery, and policy-based archive management. For more information, see What is Cloud Backup? | Supported | Supported Note For more information about how to select resource plans based on your business requirements, see Purchase resource plans. |
Overdue payments
Your ACK Pro cluster enters the Overdue state if your account balance is insufficient to pay bills. Consequently, you cannot access the API server of the cluster but the workloads on the cluster nodes can still run as normal. Your ACK Pro cluster is suspended if you do not top up your account within 15 days after a payment becomes overdue. In this case, the system removes the nodes from your cluster and deletes the cluster and the containers in the cluster. However, the nodes are not released after they are removed from the cluster. The containers that are released due to cluster deletion cannot be restored.
Billing cycle
The cluster management fee for ACK Pro clusters is charged on an hourly basis. At each hour, Alibaba Cloud meters the service that you used within the previous hour and generates the bill. After the bill is generated, fees are deducted from the balance of your Alibaba Cloud account. A bill is generated within 10 to 30 minutes after the current billing cycle ends. After a bill is generated, the fee is automatically deducted from your Alibaba Cloud account if your account balance is sufficient.
If you create a cluster less than 30 minutes before the end of a billing cycle, the cluster is not billed during the current billing cycle. Examples:
You create an ACK Pro cluster at 10:15:00. The cluster is billed during the billing cycle that ends at 11:00:00. The first bill is generated between 11:10:00 and 11:30:00.
You create an ACK Pro cluster at 10:50:00. The cluster is not billed during the billing cycle that ends at 11:00:00. Instead, the cluster is billed during the next billing cycle that ends at 12:00:00. The first bill is generated between 12:10:00 and 12:30:00.
References
Type | Description |
View bills | For more information about how to view bills, see View your bills. |
FAQ about billing | For more information about the issues that you may have when you purchase a service, such as purchase plans, see FAQ about billing. |