Cloud Controller Manager: Overview and changelog - Container Compute Service

The Cloud Controller Manager (CCM) is used to manage load balancing services in Kubernetes clusters. This topic introduces the CCM and describes the usage notes and release notes for the CCM.

Introduction

The CCM can be used to interface Kubernetes with infrastructure services of Alibaba Cloud and manage load balancing services in ACS clusters, including Classic Load Balancer (CLB) and Network Load Balancer (NLB).

When the type of a Service is set to Type=LoadBalancer, CCM creates or configures a CLB or NLB for the Service, including resources such as CLB or NLB instances, listeners, and backend servers.
When the endpoints of a Service change or the cluster nodes change, the CCM automatically updates the backend server groups of the CLB or NLB instance created for the Service.

Usage notes

For more information about how to use CCM to manage load balancing services, refer to the following topics:
- Before you configure load balancing, take note of the considerations. For more information, see Considerations for configuring a LoadBalancer Service.
- For more information about how to configure load balancing, see Use an automatically created SLB instance to expose an application and Use an existing SLB instance to expose an application.
- You can also customize load balancing by adding annotations to Service configurations. The cloud controller manager supports custom configurations. For more information, see Add annotations to the YAML file of a Service to configure CLB instances.
For more information about how to troubleshoot the issue that the CCM fails to pass the update precheck, see How to handle the issue that the CCM fails to pass the update precheck.

Release notes

April 2026

Version

Image address

Update time

Changes

Impact

v2.14.0

registry-cn-hangzhou.ack.aliyuncs.com/acs/cloud-controller-manager:v2.14.0

April 13, 2026

This version is rolling out in phases.

New features:

You can now use the annotation service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-ip-version: "DualStack" to attach both IPv4 and IPv6 backends to a server group and automatically enable IP version affinity.
You can now use the spec.loadBalancerSourceRanges field to specify the allowed client address range.
You can now use the annotation service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-default-weight to configure or update the default weight of a server group.

This upgrade does not affect your services.

January 2026

Version

Image URL

Change time

Description

Impact

v2.13.0

registry-cn-hangzhou.ack.aliyuncs.com/acs/cloud-controller-manager:v2.13.0

January 30, 2026

New features:

CLB now supports configuring additional domain certificates for HTTPS listeners with the service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-domain-extensions Annotation.
NLB now supports configuring additional certificates for TCPSSL listeners with the service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-additional-cert-ids Annotation.
NLB now supports configuring cross-zone forwarding (enabled by default) with the service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-cross-zone-enabled Annotation.

Improvements:

Optimized the ENI attachment logic to prevent failed ENI attachments from impacting other attachments.
When creating a private CLB without specifying a vSwitch, an available cluster vSwitch is now randomly selected.

This upgrade does not affect your workloads.

December 2025

Version

Image address

Release date

Description

Impact

v2.12.4

registry-cn-hangzhou.ack.aliyuncs.com/acs/cloud-controller-manager:v2.12.4

December 11, 2025

New feature:

Adds support for the Pod readiness gate webhook, which is enabled by default for new clusters. For more information, see Configure readiness gates to ensure smooth Pod updates.

Fixed issue:

Fixed an issue where deleting a Service of type NLB did not automatically clean up the associated server group.

This update does not affect your workloads.

November 2025

Version

Image address

Release date

Description

Impact

v2.12.3

registry-cn-hangzhou.ack.aliyuncs.com/acs/cloud-controller-manager:v2.12.3

November 19, 2025

Improvement:

Improved error logging for CLB. The error log now includes the pod name (targetRef) and its node information when a CLB instance cannot find the elastic network interface (ENI) for a backend pod's IP address.

Fixed issue:

Fixed a panic that could occur during Service synchronization, either when querying Network Load Balancer information or after a failed asynchronous API call.

This update does not impact your services.

September 2025

Version	Image address	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.12.1	registry-cn-hangzhou.ack.aliyuncs.com/acs/cloud-controller-manager:v2.12.1	September 11, 2025	Important Starting with this version, the default billing method for new CLB instances changes from pay-by-spec to pay-by-CLCU. Existing CLB instances are not affected. For more information, see [Product Changes] Default load balancer type and billing method change for new Services and Nginx Ingress Controller. New features Changes the default billing method for new CLB instances from pay-by-spec to pay-by-CLCU. Improvements Improves the processing performance of CLB and NLB. Adds a retry mechanism for NLB OpenAPI calls that are subject to rate limiting. Optimizes metrics related to the synchronization latency for Services, routes, and nodes. The retry wait time for `readinessGate` is changed from an exponential value to a fixed value. Fixed issues Fixed an issue where an NLB failed to automatically use the backend `targetPort` as the health check port when configured with a listener port range and manual health checks.	This update does not impact your services.

July 2025

Version	Image address	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.11.4	registry-cn-hangzhou.ack.aliyuncs.com/acs/cloud-controller-manager:v2.11.4	2025-07-17	Bug fix: Fixed an issue where creating NLB listener port ranges with the `service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-listener-port-range` annotation failed.	This upgrade will not affect your workloads.

June 2025

Version	Image address	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.11.3	registry-cn-hangzhou.ack.aliyuncs.com/acs/cloud-controller-manager:v2.11.3	June 27, 2025	Optimization Skips the OpenAPI call to add servers when a new server group is empty. Bug fix Fixed server addition failures when the `targetPort` in a Service configuration used a port name and only a subset of Pods was selected.	This upgrade does not impact your workloads.

May 2025

Version	Image address	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.11.2	registry-cn-hangzhou.ack.aliyuncs.com/acs/cloud-controller-manager:v2.11.2	May 29, 2025	Optimizations: Optimized the synchronization logic for server groups to reduce OpenAPI calls.	This upgrade does not affect your workloads.
v2.11.1	registry-cn-hangzhou.ack.aliyuncs.com/acs/cloud-controller-manager:v2.11.1	May 15, 2025	New features: You can use the `service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-ignore-weight-update` annotation to ignore updates to backend server weights. Added support for configuring multiple ACLs for CLB. NLB supports configuring a listener port range by using `service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-listener-port-range`. You can use the `NLB_ENDPOINT` environment variable to configure a custom NLB OpenAPI endpoint. Optimizations: Optimized the processing speed for node joins and route additions, reducing the number of OpenAPI calls. Parallelized listener and server group operations during Service synchronization to reduce the synchronization time for each Service. When calling the OpenAPI to create an NLB instance, CCM passes a null pointer instead of an empty string if no EIP instance ID or private IPv4 address is specified. When you call the DescribeNetworkInterfaces API, use `NextToken` instead of `PageSize` for pagination. Bug fixes: Fixed a bug where NLB did not retry for Services that use a ReadinessGate when a Pod is not ready.	This upgrade does not affect your workloads.

January 2025

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.10.2	2024-01-20	New features: Adds support for adding the `node.alibabacloud.com/spot-strategy` label to nodes to identify them as preemptible instances. Optimizations: The server group is synchronized only once when multiple listeners of a Service are associated with the server group. Fixed issues: Fixed an issue where the load balancer instance could not be created if a Service was changed from type `LoadBalancer` to another type and then back to type `LoadBalancer`. The issue that the system fails to locate the pod when it wants to update the readiness status of the pod is fixed. When updating the tags of a load balancer instance, system tags with the `acs:` prefix are ignored.	No impact on workloads.

December 2024

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.10.0	2024-12-02	Important Starting from this version, changes to the value of the `service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-additional-resource-tags` annotation affect created and reused load balancer instances. When you use this annotation, do not modify the load balancer tags in the console. Before you upgrade to this version, make sure that the tags on the load balancer instance match the annotation. New features: The readiness feature gate is supported. Adds support for modifying tags after instance creation by using the `service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-additional-resource-tags` annotation. Adds support for adding the `node.alibabacloud.com/node-pool-id` and `node.alibabacloud.com/instance-charge-type` labels to nodes. NLB now supports specifying the ALPN policy for `TCPSSL` listeners by using the `service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-alpn` and `service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-alpn-policy` annotations. Optimizations: The version of the base image is updated to Alpine 3.18. Optimized log output by adding a `reconcileID`. Fixed issues: The issue that Services associated with NLB instances may be managed by the CLB controller is fixed.	No impact on workloads.

June 2024

Version number	Release date	Description	Impact
v2.8.3	2024-06-30	New features: The Addon Token authorization mode is supported. NLB now supports creating IP-based server groups by using the `service.beta.kubernetes.io/alibaba-cloud-loadbalancer-server-group-type` annotation. For more information about NLB server groups, see NLB server groups. Optimizations: Direct access from clients to the Kubernetes API server is supported to prevent stale data generated due to data caching. The logic for creating NLB server groups is optimized to prevent the system from repeatedly creating server groups. IP address verification is performed when you add the IP addresses of elastic network interfaces (ENIs) that are allocated to pods to CLB instances. The verification is performed to ensure that the IP addresses fall within the CIDR block of the VPC where the cluster resides.	No impact on workloads.