--- layout: docs page_title: Resource Quotas sidebar_title: Resource Quotas description: Providing measures against misbehaving applications and users overdrawing resources in Vault. --- # Resource Quotas Every single interaction with Vault, whether to put secrets into the key/value store or to generate new pairs of database credentials for the MySQL database, needs to go through Vault’s API. One side effect of the API driven model is that applications and users can misbehave by overwhelming system resources through consistent and high volume API requests resulting in denial-of-service issues in some Vault nodes or even the entire Vault cluster. This risk is significantly increased when Vault API endpoints are exposed to thousands or millions of services deployed across a global infrastructure, especially in use cases of Vault where Vault is deployed as a service for internal developers. Vault provides a feature, resource quotas, that allows Vault operators to specify limits on resources used in Vault. Specifically, Vault allows operators to create and configure API rate limits. ## Rate Limit Quotas Vault allows operators to create rate limit quotas which enforce API rate limiting using a [token bucket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_bucket) algorithm. A rate limit quota can be created at the root level or defined on a namespace or mount by specifying a `path` when creating the quota. The rate limiter is applied to each unique client IP address on a per-node basis (i.e. rate limit quotas are not replicated). A client may invoke `rate` requests at any given second, after which they may invoke additional requests at `rate` per-second. A rate limit quota defined at the root level (i.e. empty `path`) is inherited by all namespaces and mounts. It acts as a single rate limiter for the entire Vault API. A rate limit quota defined on a namespace takes precedence over the global rate limit quota, and a rate limit quota defined for a mount takes precedence over the global and namespace rate limit quotas. In other words, the most specific quota rule will be applied. A rate limit can be created with an optional `block_interval`, such that when set to a non-zero value, any client that hits a rate limit threshold will be blocked from all subsequent requests for a duration of `block_interval` seconds. Vault also allows the inspection of the state of rate limiting in a Vault node through various [metrics](/docs/internals/telemetry#Resource-Quota-Metrics) exposed and through enabling optional audit logging. ## Exempt Routes By default, the following paths are exempt from rate limiting. However, Vault operators can override the set of paths that are exempt from all rate limit resource quotas by updating the `rate_limit_exempt_paths` configuration field. - `/v1/sys/generate-recovery-token/attempt` - `/v1/sys/generate-recovery-token/update` - `/v1/sys/generate-root/attempt` - `/v1/sys/generate-root/update` - `/v1/sys/health` - `/v1/sys/seal-status` - `/v1/sys/unseal` ## Learn Refer to [Protecting Vault with Resource Quotas](https://learn.hashicorp.com/vault/security/resource-quotas) for a step-by-step tutorial. ## API Rate limit quotas can be managed over the HTTP API. Please see [Rate Limit Quotas API](/api/system/rate-limit-quotas) for more details.