I wish AWS had hard spending limits.
Azure have one - you spend over the set limit(probably per billing account?) and your services are suspended. Already saved my from unexpected bill this month.
I like this option. It reminds me of a similar issue (which eventually got native AWS support): S3 permissions.
Today, there's a "Block Public Access" button which basically says "I solemnly swear that I don't want anyone outside of my account to see this S3 bucket. Please don't put this bucket on the public internet, even if I screw up my bucket policy and/or ACLs"
The option is off by default, but it's easy to find, simple to understand, and doesn't force powerusers to give up control.
Just setup billing alarms. Spend is reported continuously. These people surprised by end of month bills just aren’t paying attention to all the data AWS shows you on your spend.
If they hard shut people down then people would be posting “AWS turned off my services and took my site down blah blah blah”
What about having choice? Hard limit and alert? I’m been bite by overspending accidentally on Azure (only ~30€ but still) so the hard cap is a real reassuring thing.
It's not quite that easy. It works for stateless services like transfers that can be just stop doing whatever they're doing. But presumably you don't want AWS to start deleting S3 buckets if a threshold is reached.
I actually tend to agree that, especially for hobbyist use, an automated hard cut off that cut out most further AWS service use would probably be desirable--even if some would (mis)use it in production environments and end up blowing up their site and complaining about it. I'm sympathetic to those who find the potentially open-ended nature of AWS billing to be bothersome. An alert is just an alert. There's no guarantee you'll be in a position to receive it and act on it in a timely manner.
Set up a lambda function that looks up billing. If billing reaches certain threshold, start shutting down resources. We do that and it works just fine.
Today, there's a "Block Public Access" button which basically says "I solemnly swear that I don't want anyone outside of my account to see this S3 bucket. Please don't put this bucket on the public internet, even if I screw up my bucket policy and/or ACLs"
The option is off by default, but it's easy to find, simple to understand, and doesn't force powerusers to give up control.
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-block-public-acce...