How to fix Error: retries exhausted in Terraform

Before making configuration changes, verify the cloud provider isn't experiencing an outage:

# AWS status page
https://health.aws.amazon.com/

# Azure status page
https://status.azure.com/

# Google Cloud status page
https://status.cloud.google.com/

If there's a reported incident, wait for the provider to resolve it. Re-run Terraform after the provider confirms resolution.

For AWS, increase the maximum retry attempts in your provider block:

provider "aws" {
  region     = "us-east-1"
  max_retries = 25  # Default is 25, increase if needed
}

For other providers, check their documentation for similar settings. Each provider may have different retry configuration options.

If you're deploying many resources at once, reduce the number of concurrent operations:

# Default parallelism is 10, reduce it to 2-3
terraform apply -parallelism=3

This gives the cloud provider more time to handle each request before the next one arrives, reducing the chance of rate limiting.

You can also set this in your terraform config:

terraform {
  backend "local" {
  }
}

Increase timeouts for resources that take longer to stabilize:

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"

  timeouts {
    create = "15m"
    update = "15m"
    delete = "10m"
  }
}

resource "aws_rds_cluster" "example" {
  cluster_identifier = "my-cluster"
  
  timeouts {
    create = "45m"
    update = "60m"
    delete = "30m"
  }
}

Giving resources more time reduces the likelihood of hitting retry exhaustion.

Run Terraform with debug logging to see what specific API error is triggering retries:

export TF_LOG=debug
terraform apply 2>&1 | tee terraform.log

# Or for maximum verbosity
export TF_LOG=trace
terraform apply 2>&1 | tee terraform.log

Search the log for HTTP status codes and actual error messages:

grep -i '429\|500\|503\|timeout\|throttl' terraform.log

Look for patterns—if you see 429 (rate limit), 503 (service unavailable), or timeout errors, that identifies the problem.

If the issue is transient (provider had a brief hiccup), simply retry:

# Wait a minute or two, then retry
sleep 120
terraform apply

If the apply partially succeeded, you may need to refresh state first:

terraform refresh
terraform apply

For CI/CD, implement a retry loop in your pipeline script:

for i in {1..3}; do
  terraform apply -auto-approve && exit 0
  echo "Attempt $i failed, waiting..."
  sleep 60
done
exit 1