Quotas and admission
Limit resource creation by project, region, and resource class.
Quotas bound the resources a project can reserve. Admission checks quota before starting resource creation or expansion; quotas do not measure application demand.
Quota dimensions
Droplet-count quota includes stopped guests. CPU and memory quotas use configured allocations rather than recent usage, and block-storage quota uses provisioned GiB rather than only the guest's written files.
Reserved public addresses count even while unattached. Load balancers count while their resource exists. Snapshot and backup retention consume their corresponding retained-data dimensions independently of the source guest.
Use the usage view's resource and operation IDs to explain a reservation. Removing a source droplet is insufficient to release quotas held by independent retained disks or recovery copies.
An organization can apply a project-wide limit and a more specific regional limit. A request must satisfy every applicable limit. Resource availability and quota are independent; unused quota does not guarantee physical capacity.
Set a quota
Open Project settings → Quotas, choose a dimension and optional region, and enter a non-negative integer limit. An unset project limit inherits the organization policy. Explicit zero prevents new reservations in that dimension. Invalid negative or fractional values are rejected.
Changes below current usage do not terminate resources. The project becomes over quota for that dimension and further increases are rejected until usage falls below the applicable limit or the quota is raised.
Reservations
Provisioning reserves quota while operations run. Cleanup releases reservations only after Infra determines that the corresponding resource has been removed. A reconciling operation can therefore continue to hold quota.
Inspect Usage → Reserved by operations before assuming quota accounting is stale. Retrying creation with a new request identity can reserve additional resources instead of resolving the first request.
Failure behavior
A rejected request returns quota_exceeded with the dimension, applicable scope,
current reservation, and requested increase. Admission rejection does not start
provisioning. A later capacity failure can occur after quota reservation and
requires operation cleanup.
Concurrent requests are admitted against the quota state used by the control plane. Clients should handle a quota rejection even after a successful preview.
Quota and cost
Quotas limit resource counts or configured capacity. They do not directly cap money spent, transfer volume, or external provider charges. Use budget alerts for spending visibility and explicit automation when admission should change in response.
Use Capacity for hardware headroom and Projects for ownership and regional access.
Use Quota API to inspect inherited limits, remove individual overrides, and identify resources or operations holding a reservation.