Traffic throttling and quota-capacity exhaustion under load.
Last reviewed: February 13, 2026|25 mapped errors|Page 1 of 2
Rate-limit errors occur when request volume, burst pattern, or allocated quota exceeds what the service will currently accept.
Provider-specific error pages mapped to this category (25 total). Showing 1-15.
AWS ConditionalCheckFailedException means a DynamoDB conditional request failed because the condition expression evaluated to false (HTTP 400).
AWS ENILimitReachedException means Lambda could not create an elastic network interface because ENI limits were reached during VPC setup (HTTP 502).
AWS EntityTooLarge (Entity Too Large) means the proposed upload exceeds the maximum allowed object size. In Amazon S3, this error returns HTTP 400.
AWS InstanceLimitExceeded means your account reached the allowed running On-Demand capacity quota for the requested instance scope. This is a quota-capacity limit, not an API request-rate throttling error.
AWS InsufficientInstanceCapacity means there is not enough capacity to fulfill the EC2 instance request in the selected capacity pool.
AWS ItemCollectionSizeLimitExceededException means a DynamoDB item collection exceeded the 10 GB limit for a local secondary index partition key (HTTP 400).
AWS LimitExceeded means the IAM request exceeds current account limits for identity objects or attachment dimensions (HTTP 409).
AWS LimitExceededException means the operation would violate a configured service limit (for example resource count, rule size, or operation concurrency). Many services return this as HTTP 400.
AWS ProvisionedThroughputExceededException means the request exceeded provisioned throughput for a DynamoDB table or index, so DynamoDB throttled the request (HTTP 400).
AWS ServiceQuotaExceededException means the request exceeds a configured service quota for the account/region. Depending on service, this can surface as HTTP 400 or HTTP 402.
AWS ThrottlingException means the service rejected request rate or concurrency beyond allowed limits. Depending on service and protocol, this commonly returns HTTP 400 or HTTP 429.
AWS TooManyDistributions means processing the CloudFront request would exceed the account limit for distributions (HTTP 400).
Azure returns `AllocationFailed` when the target cluster or region cannot provide the requested VM size/capacity at deployment time.
ARM returns `DeploymentFailed` as a wrapper error when one or more inner deployment operations fail.
ARM returns `OperationNotAllowed` when the requested deployment action violates SKU, quota, policy, or resource-state constraints.
Compare Guide
Use 429 for caller-specific throttling and 503 for service-wide outages, so retry behavior, escalation paths, and incident ownership stay correct.
Compare Guide
Compare AWS ThrottlingException and GCP RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED to separate rate limiting from quota/resource exhaustion and choose the remediation path.
Playbook
Use this playbook to separate transient throttling from hard quota exhaustion and apply retry, traffic-shaping, and quota-capacity fixes safely.
No. Retry only idempotent operations with bounded backoff and jitter. Non-idempotent writes require idempotency keys or deduplication.
They start when many clients retry at fixed intervals. Synchronized retries amplify traffic and extend outage duration.
Errors persist across retry windows and traffic smoothing, and provider telemetry shows sustained quota saturation rather than short burst rejection.