How are ACK LINGJUN clusters billed?-Container Service for Kubernetes(ACK)-阿里云帮助中心

In this topic

Billing components
Overdue payments
Refunds
Billing cycle
View bills
Related documentation

Billing components

The fees for an ACK LINGJUN cluster include cluster management fees, node management fees, and fees for associated cloud services.

Cluster management fees

An ACK LINGJUN cluster shares the same enterprise-grade features as an ACK Pro cluster. It includes a managed, high-availability control plane that ensures cluster stability, reliability, and security. It meets the business requirements of large-scale production environments and simplifies cluster setup and O&M, so you can focus on developing and managing containerized applications.

Billable item	Unit price	Billing method	Billing cycle
Cluster management fee	CNY 0.64 per cluster/hour	pay-as-you-go	Billed hourly. Partial hours are billed as a full hour.

Node management fees

An ACK LINGJUN cluster supports bulk adding and management of LINGJUN compute nodes and includes automated O&M features. This simplifies node O&M and ensures a management experience consistent with ECS nodes. By default, an ACK LINGJUN cluster also provides heterogeneous resource scheduling capabilities, such as GPU sharing and topology-aware scheduling, to improve application performance and overall cluster resource utilization. For AI and HPC workloads, it provides various scheduling policies and task priority queues that optimize the scheduling efficiency of AI training and inference tasks and standardize the management and delivery of AI resources and workloads.

Billable item	Unit price		Billing method	Billing cycle
Number of GPUs	For the first 100 GPUs	CNY 10 per GPU/day	pay-as-you-go Note The system periodically counts and reports the number of GPUs in the cluster.	Billed daily Note The system automatically uses the daily peak value for billing.
	For the portion of GPUs from 101 to 500	CNY 8 per GPU/day
	For the portion of GPUs from 501 to 1,000	CNY 6 per GPU/day
	For the portion of GPUs over 1,000	CNY 4 per GPU/day

Cloud resource fees

If you use other Alibaba Cloud services with an ACK LINGJUN cluster, you are charged for those resources according to their respective billing rules. If you do not use other Alibaba Cloud services, you will not incur any additional fees. For billing information about Intelligent Computing LINGJUN resources, see Billing for Intelligent Computing LINGJUN products.

The following table describes the Alibaba Cloud services associated with ACK LINGJUN clusters and provides their billing details.

Important

Currently, you can create an ACK LINGJUN cluster only in the Intelligent Computing LINGJUN console. The billing information shown in the Intelligent Computing LINGJUN console prevails for all associated cloud services.

Cloud service	Requirement	Description	Subscription supported	Resource plan supported	Billing information
ECS	Required	Creates nodes for ACK clusters. For more information, see What is Elastic Compute Service?.	No	No	Billing overview
VPC	Required	Builds the cluster network environment and routing rules. For more information, see What is a virtual private cloud (VPC)?.	No	No	Product billing
Classic Load Balancer (CLB)	Required	Creates load balancers for the cluster. For more information, see What is Classic Load Balancer (CLB)?.	No Note The supported billing methods for CLB instances vary by scenario: CLB instances created for the API server support the subscription billing method. CLB instances created for LoadBalancer Services support only the pay-as-you-go billing method.	No	Pay-as-you-go billing for CLB Subscription (new purchases are no longer supported)
Auto Scaling	Required	Creates nodes and enables auto scaling for the cluster. For more information, see What is Auto Scaling?.	No	No	Product billing
Container Registry (ACR)	Recommended	Provides secure hosting and lifecycle management for cloud-native assets. For more information, see What is Container Registry?.	Yes Note ACR Enterprise Edition instances support only the subscription billing method. For more information, see Billing of Enterprise Edition instances.	No	Billing
Elastic IP Address (EIP)	Recommended	Enables communication between cloud resources and the internet. For more information, see What is an Elastic IP Address?.	No	No	Billing overview
Simple Log Service (SLS)	Recommended	Collects and retrieves logs for cluster components and applications. For more information, see What is Simple Log Service?.	No	Yes Note See Purchase a resource plan to purchase a resource plan that meets your business needs.	Billing overview
Alibaba Cloud Prometheus	Recommended	Provides Prometheus-based cluster monitoring and alerting. For more information, see What is Prometheus Monitoring?.	Yes Note For more information, see Billing overview.	No	Pay-as-you-go
NAT Gateway	Optional	Enables public internet access for the cluster and allows pulling images from public registries. For more information, see What is a NAT gateway?.	No	Yes Note See NAT gateway resource plans to purchase a resource plan that meets your business needs.	NAT gateway billing
Object Storage Service (OSS)	Optional	Provides an OSS-based object storage solution for application data. For more information, see What is Object Storage Service?.	No	Yes Note See Resource plan purchase guide to purchase a resource plan that meets your business needs.	Billing overview

Overdue payments

If your account balance is insufficient to pay a bill, your ACK LINGJUN cluster becomes overdue. In this state, you cannot access the cluster API server, but the workloads on your nodes continue to run. If the payment remains overdue for more than 15 days, Alibaba Cloud suspends the service. Alibaba Cloud removes the corresponding nodes from the cluster but does not release them, and then deletes the ACK LINGJUN cluster and its container instances. Deleted container instances cannot be recovered.

Alibaba Cloud provides service suspension protection, which allows you to continue using pay-as-you-go resources for a specified period or up to a specific amount after a payment becomes overdue. Billing continues as normal during this period. The protection amount is not an upper limit on your overdue payments. The amount or duration of the protection is automatically calculated and updated each month based on factors such as your historical spending on Alibaba Cloud. For more information, see Service suspension protection.

Refunds

The pay-as-you-go billing method does not support refunds.

Billing cycle

The billing cycle for the cluster management fee of an ACK LINGJUN cluster is 1 hour. In each billing cycle, Alibaba Cloud measures the previous hour's usage, generates a bill, and deducts the fee from your account. Bills are typically generated 10 to 30 minutes after a billing cycle ends. After the bill is generated, the system automatically deducts the amount from your account. If you create a cluster less than 30 minutes before the next hour, Alibaba Cloud does not bill you for that initial partial hour. For example:

If you create an ACK LINGJUN cluster at 10:15:00, the first billing cycle ends at 11:00:00. The bill is generated between 11:10:00 and 11:30:00.
If you create an ACK LINGJUN cluster at 10:50:00, the first billing cycle does not end at 11:00:00. Instead, it ends at 12:00:00. The bill is generated between 12:10:00 and 12:30:00.

View bills

Log on to the Container Service for Kubernetes console.
In the top navigation bar, click Fee to open the Expenses and Costs page.

Note
If you are logged on with an Alibaba Cloud account, you can choose Fee > Bills in the top navigation bar.
In the left-side navigation pane, choose Bill > Bill Details.
On the Bill Details page, you can filter bills by different criteria and billing cycles. You can view details such as product information, consumption type, pricing, and deductions. To query bills for an ACK LINGJUN cluster, click Product Name and select Container Service for Kubernetes from the list. Then, in the Product Name field, select ACK - Lingjun Node Management.
Note
- In the upper-right corner of the results list, click the icon to customize the displayed columns, or click the icon to export the list as a CSV file.
- For more information, see Bill details.