TooManyDistributions
AWS TooManyDistributions means processing the CloudFront request would exceed the account limit for distributions (HTTP 400).
Last reviewed: March 5, 2026|Editorial standard: source-backed technical guidance
What Does Too Many Distributions Mean?
CloudFront blocked distribution creation because account distribution quota headroom is exhausted, so rollout stops until count is reduced or quota is raised.
Common Causes
- -Account reached the CloudFront distribution count limit.
- -Provisioning creates one-off distributions without decommission lifecycle cleanup.
- -Environment sprawl multiplies distribution count faster than quota planning.
- -Quota increase request was not completed before rollout demand.
How to Fix Too Many Distributions
- 1Inventory and remove obsolete or unused distributions where safe.
- 2Consolidate low-traffic environments under shared distribution patterns when possible.
- 3Request account quota increase for planned distribution growth.
- 4Retry create only after quota headroom is confirmed.
Step-by-Step Diagnosis for Too Many Distributions
- 1Capture failing request ID and count current active distributions in account.
- 2Correlate distribution growth timeline with onboarding and environment creation workflows.
- 3Check pending deletions that are not fully retired yet from quota perspective.
- 4Validate quota values and recent increase-request history.
Distribution Quota Utilization Analysis
- -Measure active and pending-deletion distribution counts against quota (example: many disabled-but-not-fully-deleted distributions still consume quota).
- -Correlate distribution growth with environment lifecycle practices (example: preview distributions never retired after PR close).
Provisioning Gate and Cleanup Controls
- -Add pre-create quota gate in CI/CD (example: block CreateDistribution when projected count exceeds 90% headroom threshold).
- -Automate distribution retirement pipelines (example: nightly job purges expired sandbox distributions after TTL).
How to Verify the Fix
- -Confirm CreateDistribution succeeds after cleanup or quota increase.
- -Validate remaining headroom is sufficient for near-term rollout plans.
- -Ensure provisioning jobs no longer fail on distribution-limit checks.
How to Prevent Recurrence
- -Track distribution count growth and alert before approaching quota thresholds.
- -Automate retirement lifecycle for deprecated environments/distributions.
- -Include quota gate checks in CI/CD before creating new distributions.
Pro Tip
- -reserve distribution quota budget per environment class (prod/stage/preview) so temporary environments cannot starve production rollouts.
Decision Support
Compare Guide
429 Too Many Requests vs 503 Service Unavailable
Use 429 for caller-specific throttling and 503 for service-wide outages, so retry behavior, escalation paths, and incident ownership stay correct.
Compare Guide
AWS ThrottlingException vs GCP RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED
Compare AWS ThrottlingException and GCP RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED to separate rate limiting from quota/resource exhaustion and choose the remediation path.
Playbook
Rate Limit Recovery Playbook (429 / ThrottlingException / RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED)
Use this playbook to separate transient throttling from hard quota exhaustion and apply retry, traffic-shaping, and quota-capacity fixes safely.
Official References
Provider Context
This guidance is specific to AWS services. Always validate implementation details against official provider documentation before deploying to production.