Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) Pro clusters charges fees for cluster management and cloud resources. This topic describes the billing rules of ACK Pro clusters, including the billable items, overdue payments, and billing cycle.
You are not charged the cluster management fee for ACK Basic clusters or ACK dedicated clusters. You are charged for Alibaba Cloud services that are used by your ACK cluster based on the billing rules of these services. For more information, see Alibaba Cloud services related to ACK.
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.
Billable items
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 | Not supported | |
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? | Not supported | Not supported | |
Classic Load Balancer (CLB) | Required | This service provides load balancing for ACK clusters. For more information, see What is CLB? | Not supported | Not supported | |
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? | Not supported | Not supported | |
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. | Not supported | |
Elastic IP Address (EIP) | Recommended | This service enables Internet access for cloud resources. For more information, see What is an Elastic IP Address? | Not supported | Not supported | |
Elastic Container Instance | Recommended | This service is used to host workloads in ACK clusters. For more information, see What is Elastic Container Instance?. | Not supported | Not supported | |
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? | Not supported | 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? | Not supported | 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? | Not supported | 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 | Not supported | |
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? | Not supported | 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? | Not supported | Not supported | |
File Storage NAS (NAS) | Optional | This service allows you to store application data in NAS file systems. For more information, see What is NAS? | Not supported | 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? | Not supported | 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? | Not supported | Not supported | |
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
If your account balance is insufficient to pay a bill, your ACK Pro cluster enters the Inactive state. As a result, you cannot access the API server or perform any operations that involve the API server. However, your businesses on the cluster nodes can still run as normal. If your account remains overdue for more than 15 days, Alibaba Cloud will stop providing services to you. Nodes will be removed from your ACK Pro cluster and the cluster will be deleted. Other cloud resources used by your ACK Pro cluster are not released.
Top up your account to pay the bill before your service is suspended.
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 bills. |
FAQ about billing | For more information about billing issues that you may encounter when you purchase or use a cluster, such as whether you are billed when a cluster is abnormal or fails to be deleted, see FAQ about billing. |