Understanding quotas

The Lambda service is designed for short-lived compute tasks that do not retain or rely upon state between invocations. The Lambda service invokes your custom code on demand in response to events from other AWS services, or requests via the AWS CLI or AWS SDKs. Code can run for up to 15 minutes in a single invocation and a single function can use up to 10,240 MB of memory.

AWS Lambda is designed to scale rapidly to meet demand, allowing your functions to scale up to serve traffic in your application. Other AWS services frequently used in serverless applications, such as API Gateway, SNS, SQS and Step Functions, also scale up to respond to increased load. This has enabled our largest customers to build applications that scale to millions of requests quickly without having to manage underlying infrastructure.

However, before you scale an application to these levels, it’s important to understand the guardrails that are put in place to protect your account and the workloads of other customers. Service Quotas exist in all AWS services and consist of hard limits, which you cannot change, and soft limits, which you can request increases for.

By default, all new accounts are assigned a quota profile that allows exploration of the services. However, the values may need to be raised to support medium-to-large application workloads. Typically, customers request increases for their accounts as they start to expand usage of their applications. This allows the quotas to grow with usage, and help protect the account from unexpected costs caused by unintended usage.

Different AWS services have different quotas. These quotas may apply at the Region level, or account level, and may also include time-interval restrictions (for example, requests per second). For example, the number of IAM roles is an account-based quota, whereas the number of concurrent Lambda executions is a per-Region quota.

To see the quotas that apply to your account, navigate to the Service Quotas dashboard. This allows you to view your Service Quotas, request a service quota increase, and view current utilization. From here, you can drill down to a specific AWS service, such as Lambda:

In this example, sorted by the Adjustable column, this shows that Concurrent executions, Elastic network interfaces per VPC, and Function and layer storage are all adjustable limits. You could request a quota increase for any of these via the AWS Support Center. The other items provide a useful reference for other limits applying to the service.