The suggestion to setup some kind of IAM policy to shut things down and stop resource usage is insanely complicated for users who need this kind of feature the most. If I’m learning AWS and just added my CC to it, I am the last person to be qualified to setup this kind of an alert and policy from scratch. This needs to be a single text input in the billing page, like it is for countless spend-as-you-go services. When the limit is hit, the service needs to stop the usage at the customers peril, because that’s what they customer requests.
Hope this helps.
We set this up at my last job like in 10 minutes. Complexity is a matter of perspective, and if your job to do this, you have done this many-many times, and you have ready to use infrastructure as code templates.
Yes, AWS is massive, the documentation is huge and makes things inherently complex, but flexible too. You can define what behavior do you want when you exceed your limits. We can argue whether this is obfuscation or complexity or what, but based on my experience AWS optimizes it's product for enterprise-ish companies, that can afford to have SREs who knows exactly what to do in such cases. That is where they have their own training/certification program. For simple use cases there is AWS Lightsail where pricing is simple and easy to understand.
But even if it would be insanely complicated, that is a reason to downvote? HN used to be better than this kind of "I don't like your comment, let's downvote it".