terraform throttle_error ai_generated true

Error: Provider API rate limit exceeded: Throttling or TooManyRequestsException

ID: terraform/tf-provider-rate-limit

Also available as: JSON · Markdown
85%Fix Rate
87%Confidence
80Evidence
2023-01-01First Seen

Version Compatibility

VersionStatusIntroducedDeprecatedNotes
1 active — — —

Root Cause

Terraform is making too many API calls to the cloud provider, triggering rate limiting.

generic

Workarounds

  1. 85% success Reduce parallelism with -parallelism flag 
    terraform apply -parallelism=5 (default is 10) to reduce concurrent API calls

    Sources: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cli/commands/apply

  2. 82% success Wait and retry with exponential backoff, or split into smaller configurations 
    Wait a few minutes then retry; for large infrastructure, split into separate state files by service or team

    Sources: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/state

Dead Ends

Common approaches that don't work:

  1. Retry immediately without any delay 85% fail

    Immediate retries increase the request rate and extend the throttling window

  2. Increase parallelism to speed through rate limits 90% fail

    Higher parallelism means more concurrent API calls, making rate limiting worse

Error Chain

Frequently confused with: