Quotas for Express Workflows

AWS Step Functions places quotas on the sizes of certain state machine parameters, such as the number of API actions that you can make during a certain time period or the number of state machines that you can define. Although these quotas are designed to prevent a misconfigured state machine from consuming all of the resources of the system, many aren't hard quotas.

Note

If a particular stage of your state machine execution takes too long, you can configure a state machine timeout to cause a timeout event.

Quotas Related to State Machine Executions

Quota	Description
Maximum execution time	5 minutes. If an execution runs for more than the 5-minute maximum, it will fail with a States.Timeout error and emit a ExecutionsTimedOut CloudWatch metric.
Maximum execution history size	Unlimited.
Maximum execution idle time	5 minutes (constrained by the maximum execution time)
Maximum execution history retention time	To see execution history, Amazon CloudWatch Logs logging must be configured. For more information, Logging using CloudWatch Logs.

Quotas Related to Task Executions

Quota	Description
Maximum task execution time	5 minutes (constrained by the maximum execution time)
Maximum time Step Functions keeps a task in the queue	5 minutes (constrained by maximum execution time)
Maximum activity pollers per Amazon Resource Name (ARN)	Does not apply to Express Workflows.
Maximum input or output size for a task, state, or execution	262,144 bytes of data as a UTF-8 encoded string. This quota affects tasks (activity, Lambda function, or integrated service), state or execution output, and input data when scheduling a task, entering a state, or starting an execution.

Quotas Related to API Action Throttling

Some Step Functions API actions are throttled using a token bucket scheme to maintain service bandwidth.

Note

Throttling quotas are per account, per AWS Region. AWS Step Functions may increase both the bucket size and refill rate at any time. Do not rely on these throttling rates to limit your costs.

Quotas for StartExecution - All Regions

API Name	Bucket Size	Refill Rate per Second
StartExecution	6,000	6,000

Quotas Related to State Throttling

Step Functions state transitions are throttled using a token bucket scheme to maintain service bandwidth.

Note

Throttling on the StateTransition service metric is reported as ExecutionThrottled in Amazon CloudWatch. For more information, see the ExecutionThrottled CloudWatch metric.

Service Metric	Bucket Size	Refill Rate per Second
StateTransition — All regions	Unlimited	Unlimited

Requesting a Quota Increase

Use the Support Center page in the AWS Management Console to request a quota increase for resources provided by AWS Step Functions on a per-Region basis. For more information, see To Request a Quota Increase in the AWS General Reference.