AWS EC2 Request Limit Exceeded? We can help you.

Here, at Bobcares, we assist our customers with several AWS queries as part of our AWS Support Services.

Today, let us see how we can fix this error.

AWS EC2 Request Limit Exceeded

The limit exceeded message can occur in two ways:

Rate limit exceeded. The client may not make more than 200 requests an hour.

RequestLimitExceeded: Request limit exceeded.

Amazon resources use API requests from the AWS console or use AWS CLI to deploy.

To ensure API does not exceed the maximum allowed API request limits, throttling implements on each account. This helps to maintain the performance of all AWS services and to ensure fair usage for all AWS resources.

This limit can vary with the type of API request made to the service.

How does the throttling work?

AWS API works based on tokens. An account in it has a bucket of predefined tokens for each API request. Every time we use an API, it reduces the number of tokens for that specific API.

The API bucket refill according to the refill rate for that specific API.

For example, the RunInstances API of EC2 has a maximum capacity of 1000 and a refill rate of 2.

This means that we can launch up to 1000 instances at a time. However, after that, we have to wait for the API bucket to refill, to launch more instances.

Each second 2 API tokens will add to the bucket until it reaches the maximum capacity of that API bucket.

Similarly, for TerminateInstances API, the maximum capacity of the API bucket is 1000. However, the refill rate is more for this API.

The refill rate is 20 tokens per second. Thus, if we terminate 1000 instances, and exhaust all API tokens, after a second we can terminate 20 more instances.

In case we need to adjust it we get in touch with AWS support and request for limit adjustment.

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Conclusion

In short, we saw how our Support Techs fix the AWS error for our customers.