Setting up billing alarms is easy for personal accounts, it's actually only a nightmare if you go through a reseller (which is common in government contacting).
The author had an incident starting June 23rd, but didn't know about it until he got his bill July 7th, that's potentially ~14 days someone could have been abusing his account. A billing alarm would have reduced this to hours or minutes.
I would be interested how you suggest stopping a bill before it happens otherwise.. should AWS disable your website because you got posted on hacker news and now have a bill over your $10 limit? If AWS needs to stop your billing at $10, then it might need to shut down your EC2 instance and destroy your data...
If course they could offer the ability to configure the response, but if someone doesn't take the 2 minutes necessary to put a $25 billing alarm in place, what are the chances they will go through the effort of service/object based abuse policies?
At the end of the day, the issue here was that the user posted something online that people could abuse.. I don't think any CDNs cover 30 TB in free tier...
The author had an incident starting June 23rd, but didn't know about it until he got his bill July 7th, that's potentially ~14 days someone could have been abusing his account. A billing alarm would have reduced this to hours or minutes.
I would be interested how you suggest stopping a bill before it happens otherwise.. should AWS disable your website because you got posted on hacker news and now have a bill over your $10 limit? If AWS needs to stop your billing at $10, then it might need to shut down your EC2 instance and destroy your data...
If course they could offer the ability to configure the response, but if someone doesn't take the 2 minutes necessary to put a $25 billing alarm in place, what are the chances they will go through the effort of service/object based abuse policies?
At the end of the day, the issue here was that the user posted something online that people could abuse.. I don't think any CDNs cover 30 TB in free tier...