Sounds like the oomkiller. Sounds good in theory until it starts shooting processes in the head that you didn’t intend.
What would you like Amazon to do for stateful services? Should they stop and delete EBS volumes? What about databases? Simply shut them down? What happens when you lose data or it doesn’t come back up?
EBS volumes have a size, so there's an upper bound to the cost. Most of the storage is predictable, so if I try to allocate storage where the monthly cost of the raw storage is (ex) 10x my budget, I wouldn't have a problem with the request being denied.
For non-storage resources like EC2, network bandwidth, etc. I'd be fine with having a hard limit where everything just breaks, especially for stuff that's not production.
There could also be better, self managed quotas on resources. SES is a good example. AFAIK the quota is all or none across the entire account. IMO, it's not a good idea to give a user that needs to send (made up numbers) 1k emails per day credentials that can send 250k emails a day.
I have 3 AWS accounts. I don't keep anything in my main account. It's for billing only. I have a sub account for production that I try to keep pristine. I have a sub account for development and testing. It's the development account that scares me. I spend less than $50 per month. I'd rather have my whole development account de-allocated than get a bill for $1k.
What would you like Amazon to do for stateful services? Should they stop and delete EBS volumes? What about databases? Simply shut them down? What happens when you lose data or it doesn’t come back up?