Oracle Cloud Rate Limits

Overview

OCI API rate limits vary by service and are not well documented. A 429 TooManyRequests response kills your automation, and unlike AWS or Azure, OCI does not return a Retry-After header. This skill maps known limits by service, implements exponential backoff with jitter, and provides circuit breaker patterns for bulk operations.

Purpose: Build resilient OCI API clients that handle throttling gracefully without data loss.

Prerequisites

• OCI Python SDK — pip install oci
• OCI config file at ~/.oci/config with valid credentials (user, fingerprint, tenancy, region, key_file)
• Python 3.8+
• Understanding of which OCI service you are calling (limits vary per service)

Instructions

Step 1: Know the Limits

OCI publishes some rate limits, but many are undocumented. Here are the known limits observed in production: