Can I put a budget on a Windows Azure account?

I'm organising Windows Azure training and need to prepare a budget for such a course. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a way to limit the number of running instances, usage of the different resources. Can I somehow set a budget on an account as in Google App Engine to prevent abuse from students?

Any suggestions are welcomed

From serverfault Daniel Victoria

• Not that I know of. Unfortunately, I had an Azure account that ran up a huge set of charges without any warning. I tried to set a limit but I couldn't see how.

  Daniel Victoria : I was afraid so. Thanks anyway for taking the time to answer.
  From rsteckly

• This is a big problem with Azure at the moment. Hopefully Microsoft will soon take care of the terrible costs management on Azure and allow users to put budgets on their accounts and have more fine-grained monitoring on how charges are accrued.

  AFAIK, the closest thing to an account budget you can get currently are the recently introduced email notifications for compute hours usage. You can read more here.

  From tishon