coder/docs/admin/users/quotas.md

Quotas

Quotas are a mechanism for controlling spend by associating costs with workspace templates and assigning budgets to users. Users that exceed their budget will be blocked from launching more workspaces until they either delete their other workspaces or get their budget extended.

For example: A template is configured with a cost of 5 credits per day, and the user is granted 15 credits, which can be consumed by both started and stopped workspaces. This budget limits the user to 3 concurrent workspaces.

Quotas are scoped to Groups in Enterprise and organizations in Premium.

Definitions

• Credits is the fundamental unit representing cost in the quota system. This integer can be arbitrary, or it can map to your preferred currency.
• Budget is the per-user, enforced, upper limit to credit spend.
• Allowance is a grant of credits to the budget.

Establishing Costs

Templates describe their cost through the daily_cost attribute in resource_metadata. Since costs are associated with resources, an offline workspace may consume less quota than an online workspace.

A common use case is separating costs for a persistent volume and ephemeral compute:

resource "docker_volume" "home_volume" {
  name = "coder-${data.coder_workspace_owner.me.name}-${data.coder_workspace.me.name}-root"
}

resource "coder_metadata" "home_volume" {
    resource_id = docker_volume.home_volume.id
    daily_cost  = 10
}

resource "docker_container" "workspace" {
  count = data.coder_workspace.me.start_count
  image = "codercom/code-server:latest"
  ...
  volumes {
    container_path = "/home/coder/"
    volume_name    = docker_volume.home_volume.name
    read_only      = false
  }
}

resource "coder_metadata" "workspace" {
    count       = data.coder_workspace.me.start_count
    resource_id = docker_container.workspace.id
    daily_cost  = 20
}

When the workspace above is shut down, the docker_container and coder_metadata both get deleted. This reduces the cost from 30 credits to 10 credits.

Resources without a daily_cost value are considered to cost 0. If the cost was removed on the docker_volume above, the template would consume 0 credits when it's offline. This technique is good for incentivizing users to shut down their unused workspaces and freeing up compute in the cluster.

Establishing Budgets

Each group has a configurable Quota Allowance. A user's budget is calculated as the sum of their allowances.

For example:

Group Name	Quota Allowance
Frontend	10
Backend	20
Data	30

Username	Groups	Effective Budget
jill	Frontend, Backend	30
jack	Backend, Data	50
sam	Data	30
alex	Frontend	10

By default, groups are assumed to have a default allowance of 0.

Quota Enforcement

Coder enforces Quota on workspace start and stop operations. The workspace build process dynamically calculates costs, so quota violation fails builds as opposed to failing the build-triggering operation. For example, the Workspace Create Form will never get held up by quota enforcement.

Up next

• Group Sync
• Control plane configuration