Goodbye AWS Service Limits: Hello New Quota Dashboard

AWS will no longer face the unpleasant surprise of being told they have hit their service limits on a big day, after the public cloud provider released a new tool for users to view and manage their service limits: resource quotas intended to protect users from unintentional spend.

Rebranding AWS service limits service quotas (“to better represent our philosophy of providing you with better control of your AWS resources”) the company said the tool will let users request and track quota increases via the AWS console, by API call, or through the command line interface.

Finally! A good way to manage something that has bitten a lot of big cloud deployments. Nothing like hitting a hidden service limit on a big day. ☹️ https://t.co/avFGhsMPtQ

— Patrick McFadin (@PatrickMcFadin) June 25, 2019

AWS Service Limits: A Thing of the Past?

The belated move was welcomed by public cloud users, who have faced hitting hidden service limits at inopportune moments after unexpectedly maxing out their AWS resources; never a welcome feeling for an enterprise user.

Customers can view default quotas for 90 AWS services, with more coming soon. The service is, ostensibly, free: AWS instead charges users for setting up CloudWatch alarms instead; for example to receive an alert when they’ve hit 80 percent of their service quota for a given public cloud service like S3. (CloudWatch is AWS’s monitoring and management service).

Amazon offered a number of examples to illustrate:

“Alan is a Cloud Admin in a large financial services company. His task is to provision resources for his growing AWS fleet. Alan uses AWS Organisations to manage his 500 AWS accounts. Once Alan creates an account, he routinely requests quota increases to make sure the account is configured in a consistent manner.””With Service Quotas, Alan can accomplish the same goal with a pre-defined Service Quota template in his organizations’ master account.”

Once this template is active, for each new account he creates in his organization, the same quota increase requests will be created. Alan can track the status of these requests in the ‘Quota increase history’ page of the newly created accounts.