What are Amazon EMR Service Quotas

Your AWS account has default service quotas, also known as limits, for each AWS service. The EMR service has two types of limits:

• Limits on resources - You can use EMR to create EC2 resources. However, these EC2 resources are subject to service quotas. The resource limitations in this category are:

  • The maximum number of active clusters that can be run at the same time.

  • The maximum number of active instances per instance group.

• Limits on APIs - When using EMR APIs, the two types of limitations are:

  • Burst limit – This is the maximum number of API calls you can make at once. For example, the maximum number of AddInstanceFleet API requests that you can make per second is set at 5 calls/second as a default. This implies that the burst limit of AddInstanceFleet API is 5 calls/second, or that, at any given time, you can make at most 5 AddInstanceFleet API calls. However, after you use the burst limit, your subsequent calls are limited by the rate limit.

  • Rate limit – This is the replenishment rate of the API's burst capacity. For example, replenishment rate of AddInstanceFleet calls is set at 0.5 calls/second as a default. This means that after you reach the burst limit, you have to wait at least 2 seconds (0.5 calls/second X 2 seconds = 1 call) to make the API call. If you make a call before that, you are throttled by the EMR web service. At any point, you can only make as many calls as the burst capacity without being throttled. Every additional second you wait, your burst capacity increases by 0.5 calls until it reaches the maximum limit of 5, which is the burst limit.