AWS Service Quotas
A service for centrally managing AWS service usage limits, submitting quota increase requests, and configuring alerts
Overview
AWS Service Quotas is a service that provides a central location to view and manage your AWS service quotas (formerly called limits). It enables you to look up quota values for AWS services, request quota increases, and set up CloudWatch alarms to alert you when usage approaches a quota. This helps prevent service disruptions caused by unexpectedly hitting limits during scaling events or new deployments.
Quota Types and Practical Quota Increase Requests
AWS service quotas fall into two categories: adjustable quotas that can be increased through requests, and fixed quotas that cannot be changed. Adjustable quotas include EC2 instance limits per region, Lambda concurrent executions, S3 bucket count, and VPC count. Fixed quotas include limits like 5 VPC peering connections per route table or 200 route entries per route table. Quota increase requests are submitted through the Service Quotas console or API, with most requests processed automatically within minutes to hours. Some quotas require AWS support review and may take several days. Best practice is to request increases proactively before reaching limits rather than reactively after hitting them. For new accounts, many quotas start at conservative defaults that need increasing before production workloads can run. The request history tracks all submitted requests and their approval status.
CloudWatch Alarm Design for Quota Monitoring
Service Quotas integrates with CloudWatch to create alarms that trigger when resource usage approaches quota limits. For each quota, you can create an alarm at a specified threshold percentage (e.g., alert at 80% utilization). This proactive monitoring prevents outages caused by hitting limits during traffic spikes or auto-scaling events. The recommended pattern is creating alarms for all quotas that your workload actively uses, with thresholds set to provide sufficient lead time for requesting increases. CloudWatch metrics for quota utilization are available at no additional charge. Alarms can trigger SNS notifications to operations teams, or invoke Lambda functions for automated remediation such as submitting increase requests programmatically. Dashboard widgets displaying quota utilization alongside application metrics provide operational visibility into capacity headroom.
Organizations Templates for Multi-Account Management
In multi-account environments managed through AWS Organizations, Service Quotas templates enable applying consistent quota configurations across all member accounts. A template defines the desired quota values, and when new accounts are created or added to the organization, the template automatically requests the specified quota increases. This eliminates the manual process of individually configuring quotas in each new account. Templates are particularly valuable for organizations with standardized workload patterns where every account needs the same baseline quotas. The delegated administrator feature allows a central operations account to view and manage quotas across all organization accounts without requiring access to each account individually. Combined with AWS Config rules that check whether quotas meet minimum thresholds, you can maintain compliance across the organization and detect accounts that have fallen below required levels.