I've experienced plenty of scenarios where costs have quite legitimately spiked.
Ultimately whatever solution you put in place, someone is going to complain about it. At least with the system they currently have in place they can reimburse customers. Whereas it is a lot harder to fix their reputation after they've automatically stopped production services.
Given how easily they reimburse customers, I suspect it's intentional - one can be "fixed after the fact" and the other can't - if your site goes down during a slashdotting and you lose sales, etc, there's no getting those back, but if you inadvertently run costs high, they can just refund/cancel those costs.
Ive seen nobody on HN, twitter, reddit complain about "my site was down during heavy business since i turned on hard billing setting". Not a single person.
However, I see frantic after frantic post of "I was testing something on AWS and it caused me a $X000 or $X0000 bill."
But as the posts in here are apt to suggest - you can always beg AWS support for a reversal. Great plan there.
The first is obviously customer error and unless you're posting to get laughed at, you're likely not to gain traction.
(Also one could make the "nobody uses Azure" joke here.)
Personally I think that much of AWS is "way overpowered" for the normal person/business, and you shouldn't be playing with it if a $X0k bill would be impactful (as likely other solutions are much better tuned to your needs and money).
If you drop a laptop, that's customer error. You break something or do something unintended that damages it, that's customer error.
When you are handed a tool that has multiple hidden guns and explosives inside of it, and ends up blowing your foot off is malfeasance of the people who handed the tool to you.
AWS is that tool. And given that Azure can implement these guard-rails and AWS chooses not to tells me all I need to know.
> Personally I think that much of AWS is "way overpowered" for the normal person/business, and you shouldn't be playing with it if a $X0k bill would be impactful (as likely other solutions are much better tuned to your needs and money).
Please compare and contrast this with "Learn AWS for furthering your career".
Ultimately whatever solution you put in place, someone is going to complain about it. At least with the system they currently have in place they can reimburse customers. Whereas it is a lot harder to fix their reputation after they've automatically stopped production services.