Glossary
Resource Quota
A resource quota caps the total amount of some resource a principal may consume over a defined period — total storage used, total compute-hours run, total records processed — regardless of how that consumption is distributed across individual requests over that period. This is a genuinely different control from a rate limit, which bounds how frequently a caller may act; a caller could stay comfortably within any reasonable rate limit while still exhausting a resource quota over time through sustained, moderate-paced use.
Quotas matter for a different failure mode than rate limits address: not a burst of rapid requests overwhelming a system in the moment, but a slow, steady accumulation that eventually exhausts a shared resource or drives disproportionate cost, neither of which a purely frequency-based control is designed to catch.