Bedrock Quota Health Check
Monitor and manage Bedrock model quotas to prevent throttling. Bedrock enforces two quota types per model per region: requests per minute (RPM) and tokens per minute (TPM).
Table of Contents
- How Quota Reservation Works
- Audit Workflow
- CloudWatch Metrics
- When You're Being Throttled
- Quota Increase Requests
How Quota Reservation Works
Bedrock reserves TPM quota at request start based on: InputTokens + CacheWriteInputTokens + CacheReadInputTokens + maxTokens. If maxTokens is unset, it defaults to the model's maximum (up to 64K–128K), reserving far more quota than needed.
Example (Claude Sonnet, 2M TPM quota):
maxTokens=1000, 500 input tokens: reserves 1,500 → ~1,333 concurrent requestsmaxTokensunset (defaults to 64K): reserves ~64,500 → ~31 concurrent requests
This is the most common cause of unexpected ThrottlingException. Always set maxTokens explicitly.
Cache read tokens are included in the initial reservation but released at settlement — prompt caching effectively increases your usable TPM capacity.
Audit Workflow
1. Check Current Quotas
aws service-quotas list-service-quotas --service-code bedrock --region <REGION> --profile <PROFILE> --query "Quotas[?starts_with(QuotaName, 'Invoke')].{Name:QuotaName, Value:Value}" --output table2. Check Recent Usage vs Limits
Run the quota health script:
python3 scripts/check-quota-health.py --region <REGION> --profile <PROFILE>The script compares current quota limits against peak CloudWatch metrics over the last 24 hours and flags models approaching their limits.
3. Assess maxTokens Impact
Review application code for Bedrock calls without explicit maxTokens. Each unset call wastes quota proportional to the model's max output tokens.
CloudWatch Metrics
Key metrics in the AWS/Bedrock namespace (dimension: ModelId):
| Metric | What It Tells You |
|---|---|
InvocationCount |
RPM usage — compare against RPM quota |
InvocationThrottles |
Throttled requests — any value > 0 needs attention |
InputTokenCount |
Input token consumption per request |
OutputTokenCount |
Actual output tokens — use to right-size maxTokens |
InvocationLatency |
Latency distribution — spikes may correlate with throttling |
Sample CloudWatch Logs Insights query (requires model invocation logging enabled):
fields @timestamp, @message
| filter modelId like /claude/
| stats count() as requests, sum(inputTokenCount) as totalInput, sum(outputTokenCount) as totalOutput by bin(1m)
| sort @timestamp descWhen You're Being Throttled
Decision table for resolving ThrottlingException:
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
maxTokens not explicitly set |
Set it to expected output length — biggest single impact |
| Traffic is bursty | Use cross-region inference profiles (us., eu., global. prefix) to distribute across regions |
| Steady-state traffic exceeds quota | Request a quota increase (see below) |
| Latency-sensitive workload | Use priority service tier for preferential processing |
| Non-time-critical workload | Use flex service tier (may queue during peak, lower cost) |
| Consistent high-volume | Request quota increase + use cross-region inference for headroom |
Quota Increase Requests
aws service-quotas request-service-quota-increase --service-code bedrock --quota-code <QUOTA_CODE> --desired-value <VALUE> --region <REGION> --profile <PROFILE>To find the quota code for a specific model:
aws service-quotas list-service-quotas --service-code bedrock --region <REGION> --profile <PROFILE> --query "Quotas[?contains(QuotaName, '<MODEL_NAME>')].{Code:QuotaCode, Name:QuotaName, Value:Value}"Quota increases are reviewed by AWS — plan 1–3 business days. For urgent production needs, open an AWS Support case.
