If I budget enough to store 1TB of data for 1 month, then on the first day of the month I store 2TB of data - what should the behaviour be after 15 days?

Nuke the data. It’s gone forever if you didn’t back it up elsewhere. This should be a meaningful risk mitigation that I can employ to avoid having a catastrophic financial disaster.

This isn’t a limit I’m setting at some percentage above expected costs, it’s: “I don’t want to take out a HELOC if something goes wrong”

Unfortunately, a lot of people keep their backups in the same cloud account as their primary data. Thinking that multiple copies and multiple availability zones are sufficient.

For these users, the article’s €54k bill would be replaced with their business data getting wiped out.

Read/write access should be frozen, data should be saved for 1 month so you have time to react to warning emails. If you didn't upgrade in that time, it should be deleted.

You know that's not how the cloud works. If you're build by the hour for compute and that compute is powering a server, the only way to stop that is by shutting off the compute, breaking the server.

I would love to have a “if the bill for this hobby project becomes a threat to my ability to pay my mortgage, nuke it.” If I cared about the data enough. I’d have backed it up.

And just shut down the service which is surging.

If you have a lambda set up that normally runs a hundred times a day, and suddenly it tries to spin up 10 million instances, it should block that unless you specifically enable it.