AWS First Steps
Management

AWS Service Quotas

A service for centrally managing AWS service usage limits, submitting quota increase requests, and configuring alerts

About 4 min readWritten and edited by Awashiro

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 cannot be increased. Whether a given quota is adjustable is shown in the adjustability column of the Service Quotas console. Quota increase requests are submitted through the Service Quotas console or API. Processing time varies with the type of quota and the content of the request, and some quotas require review by AWS Support. It is safer to submit increase requests before you approach a limit rather than after you hit one. 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 quotas that support CloudWatch alarms (shown on each quota's detail page in the console), 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. A practical pattern is to create alarms for the quotas your workload actively uses, with thresholds that leave enough lead time to request an increase. 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, a Service Quotas request template lets you apply a consistent baseline of quota increases to new member accounts. A template defines the desired quota values, and when new accounts are created in the organization, the template automatically requests the specified quota increases. Updating the template does not change quota values for existing accounts, and requests may be approved, denied, or partially approved. 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. Because the template is associated with the organization as a whole and applies only to new accounts, differences by account purpose (development, production, data analytics) are handled with individual increase requests after the account is created. A periodic check that compares each account's applied quota values against your required baseline helps detect accounts that have fallen below required levels.

References (Official AWS Resources)

The primary sources for this page are the official AWS website and documentation. Check the official pages below for the latest specifications and pricing.

If this page and the official documentation disagree, treat the official documentation as authoritative.

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Related Terms

AWS Trusted AdvisorAWS OrganizationsAmazon CloudWatchAWS Config

Related Services

AWS Trusted AdvisorAWS OrganizationsAmazon CloudWatchAWS Systems Manager

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