AWS has strong DOS protection and just doesn’t tend to shout about it. Putting services behind AWS for some basically free protection has been a trick against basic volumetric attacks for a while.
AWS charges an arm and a leg for outbound traffic, inbound traffic is free. Volumetric attacks are all about overwhelming your inbound; if AWS will swallow that at their ACL layer for you, that's seems pretty useful, and shouldn't generate billing.
Certainly... It was more of a if you're on AWS and you attract a volumetric attack, it's not going to cost you an arm and a leg.
Maybe you could run www on AWS and your real service somewhere with reasonable prices for traffic. In my experience, people who randomly DDoS tend to hit www rather than useful parts of a service.
In terms of running a data lake or keeping stuff for a long time, it's great, but of course they're banking on you moving a bunch of data to AWS to either train ML off of (compute costs) or keep it there and rack up storage space charges.
Seems to benefit AWS as well when if it's not blocked, your server can respond with some payload which means useless outbound traffic for AWS to pay and to charge customer to make them unhappy but instead if AWS drops them, good for both.
Basic volumetric - which is what the smaller providers can't handle, AWS can eat easily.
I don't believe I've been charged for this type of attack. The one you should look out for if you are new to AWS and trying to do this "trick" is L7 repeated downloads of high-file-size content to consume your budget rapidly.
I don’t believe GCP has such a service explicitly, although in 2 years of using them I’ve never seen any DDoS like behavior despite having multiple public endpoints. I am assuming there is some kind of automatic remediation that happens, or else I’ve just been extremely lucky.
Not sure if DigitalOcean falls under big providers, but they offer the same solution as Linode, but made a business decision to not advertise it. Even though they haven't advertised it the reduction of null routes and better customer experience has paid for the cost.