I have seen similar stories with AWS. It’s somewhat shocking to me that there’s no way to ask to get cut off above some dollar limit. Is every customer risking unbounded liability?
However, setting usage limits would be a solution for both companies and hobbyists. AWS could then calculate the maximum spending per month that is possible with the current settings. I bet they would never build such a calculator and the necessary usage limits because it makes it easier for customers to optimize costs.
But to be honest, it’s somewhat surprising that companies are willing to take on the risk of unbounded financial liability if someone makes a mistake.
Most AWS users would rather lose money than data and service for their customers, and bills are easier to negotiate than trying to recover your infrastructure.
The in-between approach is to create rate limits (either per sliding scale or total), which exists for some products but is probably too complicated to implement for everything.
Shutting off services can mean destroying the customer's data with no way for them to recover it. That could be from terminated ephemeral disks, or a terminated database, or cutting off a critical upload stream into their instances.
Its a lot easier to reduce/forgive a bill when a customer makes a mistake than to recover their lost data (or loss to their business).
What if the new services that are being suspended are writes to queuing systems that are used for order fulfillment or other business processes, should we drop these orders on the floor?
It's much easier to handle it post facto, and write off the expense on the cloud provider side, which doesn't cost them that much anyway. There are some guard rails that prevent people from doing catastrophic things that they can't write off (eg. taking all of the compute capacity of a region for hours on end, preventing other customers from actually using it) using limits that require manual intervention to be raised.
I imagine they would have been more forceful if it was a larger bill.
Never used one for this purpose but since billing happens after the fact (and monthly), AWS won't be aware of the limit until after the monthly billing occurs. They’ll just tell you the card failed and you have a billing liability to take care of (and give you some time to fix it) while still letting you rack up additional debt with services running after the billing fails; they definitely won't cut you off when you've reached the level that would meet the limit on your card (and couldn't even in theory without realtime notification of other charges against the card, even if they were inclined to.)