Reconnect or Rotate Credentials Safely

Published · Last updated: June 2026 · 3 min read

Overview

If your cloud provider credentials expire or are revoked, CloudAIPilot will lose the ability to manage servers, collect monitoring data, or run backups for that account. This article explains how to recognise expired credentials and how to reconnect or rotate them.

Recognising Expired or Invalid Credentials

When credentials expire or are revoked, the cloud account status in CloudAIPilot changes to Invalid or Revoked. You will also see:

Background operations (provisioning, backups, disk operations) failing in the Activity Center with 401 or 403 errors from the cloud provider.
FinOps data stopping updating — the last sync timestamp will be stale.
Monitoring metrics may stop arriving for servers on that account.

To confirm the status, go to Cloud Accounts. Accounts with a problem show as Invalid (credentials rejected by the provider) or Revoked (access was explicitly revoked). You can also click the account and use Test Connection to check whether the current credentials are still valid.

How to Reconnect or Rotate Credentials

There is no "Update Credentials" option on the existing account card. To supply new credentials, use the standard Connect Account flow:

Generate new credentials in your cloud provider's console (new IAM role, service account key, or personal access token).
In CloudAIPilot, go to Cloud Accounts and click Connect Account.
Select the same provider and enter the new credentials.
If CloudAIPilot detects that the account was previously connected (matching provider and account identifier), it will reconnect and reactivate any servers that were previously associated with the account.

Tip: If you connected the same provider before (even after disconnecting), CloudAIPilot will recognise it as a reconnect and restore all previously associated servers, sites, and backup schedules automatically.

Zero-Downtime Rotation

Rotating credentials in CloudAIPilot does not affect your running applications. CloudAIPilot communicates with cloud provider management APIs — it does not inject itself into the runtime of your servers. Your Nginx, Docker, and database services remain unaffected while credentials are being updated.

After Reconnecting

After reconnecting with new credentials:

Go to Cloud Accounts → click the account → click Test Connection to confirm the new credentials are working.
Click Verify Permissions to confirm all required IAM permissions are still in place on the new credentials.