Have you contacted Azure? On one hand you owe the money “fair and square”, but on the other if I were them I’d waive an unexpected $10k bill to a good faith actor that was incurred without any proactive notification by Azure.
Their interests is keeping you as a long term customer. So, they will help you if they can. Unexpectedly high bills like that can end the relation in no time. And 10K is not a lot on a yearly basis. That's a few months of normal usage for lots of companies. So, protecting that revenue is worth something to them. That's also worth realizing when you deal with cloud providers: you are spending non trivial amounts of money on their services and support is part of that deal.
I've seen several cases on both Azure and AWS that bills got weaved after someone opened support ticket starting with "oops, I just did..."
He did not enable alerts.
The post applies to everyone and I’d second it. Ask nicely for a refund in these situations, the worst that can happen is they say no.
Where did they say that “only Troy Hunt shall receive a refund, for only Troy Hunt is a good faith actor, so say we all”?
The one thing that is special about Troy is that he is providing a service for the public good but that has nothing to do with being 'good faith' or not.
But Azure’s regular prices are definitely high enough that they’re not a loss leader.
That assumes the only way they make money is on peoples understandable mistakes or lack of care. Doesn't seem to be the case for these services (unlike, say, many gym subscriptions).
It seems far more likely that if they refunded all the well documented issues like this one, their bottom line wouldn't be impacted.