For our region that limit is set to 1000. That might sound like a lot when you start, but you quickly realise it’s easy to reach once you have enough Lambdas and you scale up. We found ourselves hitting that limit a lot once our traffic and therefore our demands from our system started scaling.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/servicequotas/latest/userguide/r...
The textbook example of this going wrong is a lambda that is invoked on uploading to S3 that writes the result to S3. There's even an AWS article on it - [0]
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/avoiding-recursive-invo...
Specifically as it relates to Lambdas there's solid rationale behind these limits, but I agree that in many other cases the limits seem arbitrary and annoying.
- for limited resources like IPs, it avoids one customer eating all the stock. Yes he’s paying for them, but other customers wouldn’t be able to get some anymore, generating frustrated users and revenue loss - for most other "infinite stock" resources, it avoids the bill exploding. It’s good for the customer, but also for the provider as they’re sure to be paid and not take a billing decline or sucking up all of a startup’s money.