Please setup billing alerts, know what your daily spend should be, add a little for if things grow a little unexpectedly. But you should absolutely be getting alerts if your spend is out of the ordinary for > 2 hours.
Slightly unrelated, but I do this for everything involving my personal finances. All of my credit cards have mobile apps that instantly push notifications whenever they are used. My bank app sends me notifications for any withdrawal or deposit. I even have alerts for my investments. I guess I'm just adamant in knowing exactly where (and when) my money comes or goes.
I was really happy when all my cards/banks started offering options like this. I essentially never have to go over my statements and transaction history with a fine-toothed comb anymore, because it's so so so easy to notice a fraudulent transaction immediately as it happens.
Can you even do you do that on AWS? Best I could find for the total spend is the cloudwatch EstimatedCharge metric, which only updates once a day (at least last time I checked)
Apart from that you seem to be limited to monitoring individual resources, or using some external service that enunerates everything
If a hacker gets control of your account, probably the first thing he will do is disabling all checks. Does Azure(or even AWS/GCP) provide some "non-configurable" default alert?
What is AWS/Azure supposed to do if you run out of funds? Delete your resources? Storage costs money too, simply shutting down the services won't quite cut it. VPS consumption is relatively easy to predict, complex cloud services are not.
Why any VPS provider doesn't delete my VPS outright, instead nagging me for the payment?
Why any e-mail provider doesn't delete my account if the payment weren't received in time?
Why AWS/Az should outright delete my services as soon as the money on my pre-paid account hit $0?
> Storage costs money too, simply shutting down the services won't quite cut it.
Until you give AWS/Az $B in storage costs it costs nothing for them to store your measly couple of TBs of data for a month, till you sort out your money situation.
And to give you a perspective on the situation: I have a service in AWS. Every month AWS sends me tons of letters of how it can't charge me for the service, how this can lead to a service cancelling, what should immediately run and punch in a working card to the account or else.
The thing is what the cost of the service is ... $0.51/month. For $6 I could've had a year of nag-free service, for $60 I could've had a 10 years of nag-free service. I would happily thew not even $60, but $100 to AWS so I could just forget it about it, instead they spend more resources trying to charge me every month and sending me all those scary letters.
> complex cloud services are not.
There is absolutely nothing what would prevent something to alert you (or disable, if you wish so!) if your current spending is 5x or 10x of your previous month. In OP's situation this is 66x difference.
Ask the customer to pay collateral when enabling this for a service, then use that to pay for the data storage in the shutdown grace period, reimburse it (or count it against future use) if it was never used. You can also easily add this on all the elastic services,e.g. your price per GB simply goes up a bit for S3 in the first month, until the amount of data you have is fully in your "insurance".
Or, you know, price it in and do your own risk estimates to make this a seemless experience, but AWS got away with not offering anything, so I'm already assuming you want to be passing all the cost to the customer (heck, amazon, if you are reading this, you can even skim a little bit of the "insurance" money! )
same thing it does when you dont pay. all goes down. databases readonly mode. Eventually it all gets deleted if you dont pay for a another month or so.