> AWS should provide features where you are prompted to set a hard budget limit when you first signup and services fail once that's exceeded
They should, but the entire internal metering & bill generation pipeline isn't setup to support that. You can configure billing alerts but these will only refresh on updates to your estimated bill (typically re-computed every 8hrs). And since service teams are responsible for posting metering records to commerce platform their implementation may vary.
TLDR: AWS Commerce Platform is a mess.
Source: Ex-AWS SDE
How is it that they can set up a quantum computer but not up-front billing?
I'm waiting for Corey to show up and say that solving quantum spin equations is easier than AWS billing
But, in all seriousness: businesses produce products in reaction to their financial incentives, and no one(?) is quitting AWS because they don't offer billing limits