Quotas explained

What a quota is

A quota is a limit a parent account sets on how much of a resource a tenant can consume.

• Quotas apply per tenant and cover dimensions such as CPU, memory, storage and the number of VMs.
• They cap what a tenant may consume; a tenant's usage is always measured against, and bounded by, its parent's own remaining capacity.
• There are no invented platform-wide caps — a quota is simply the ceiling a parent chooses, within the parent's capacity.
• For the exact list of dimensions and their units, see the Quotas reference (click here).

Guarantee vs burstable max

A quota dimension can express both a floor and a ceiling.

• A guarantee is the amount held for the tenant — capacity it can always rely on.
• A max (or burst) is the ceiling the tenant may rise to when spare capacity is available, above its guarantee.
• The gap between guarantee and max is burstable headroom: usable, but not reserved, so it depends on what is free at the time.
• Setting only a max, with no guarantee, allows use up to that ceiling with nothing held in reserve.

Unlimited and PAYG

Not every quota is a hard number.

• A dimension left at 0 or unset is unlimited — there is no fixed platform-wide cap, only the parent's remaining capacity.
• Validator ranges may constrain the values you can type into a given field, but an empty or zero value still means "no limit".
• Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) lets a tenant consume on demand and be charged for what it uses, rather than working against a pre-set ceiling.
• Consumption and charges are surfaced under Organisation → Billing (and, for tenants, Multi-tenancy → Billing).

Reading headroom

The quota views show how much room is left, not just the limits.

• Headroom is the difference between a limit and current usage — what remains available right now.
• Because a tenant is bounded by its parent, effective headroom is the smaller of the tenant's own remaining allowance and the parent's remaining capacity.
• Watching headroom helps you spot a tenant approaching its ceiling before new requests start to be refused.
• Review quotas and headroom under Organisation → Quotas; consult the Quotas reference (click here) for what each dimension measures.