Shared hosting providers from the late 90s onward typically had systems like this standard.

AWS sorta has something like this already with CloudWatch, but it'd be nice if it was simpler and immediate instead of reactive. I just run a little reserved EC2 instance so my main billing risks are excessive data out or forgetting to renew a reservation and reverting to by-the-hour billing. So that I don't worry about it much I have three alarms that notify me if either "estimated charges > $x for 1 datapoints within 6 hours", or there's "anomalous" NetworkOut over a day, or "there's more than X total NetworkOut over a day", and another alarm that's "NetworkOut > Y for 1 datapoint within 15 minutes" that notifies me and shuts the instance down. I'd like to have a hard cap of "my instantaneous billing running total for the month, not my 'estimate', has exceeded $x, shut everything down" but what's there is something.

I came here to basically say something like this: if there's a hard limit, your business will basically shut down entirely. It's hard (impossible) for cloud providers to automagically shut down services based on each customer's priorities.

I don't think there's a magical solution to this. There might be a company that sets a $1K USD/month limit, forgets about it, and suddenly the cloud provider shuts down everything a year later, while "everyone" is unavailable or something like that.

There are so many scenarios, and I honestly feel that the cloud providers have decided on the most fool-proof solution both for them and their clients.

>Shut everything down

Ok. But the Auto Scaling Groups are free - so I can keep that on, right? Oh, look! They just launched more EV2s, how convenient. Should I back these up to S3? With CRR enabled?

Tee hee hee