A US streaming media group was eighteen months into a three-year EDP and 14% under-consuming the commitment. The AWS account team's response was a new commitment uplift, more services attached, and a longer term. We did the opposite — right-sized the commit, restructured the Savings Plan portfolio, and re-cut the private-pricing addendum. $6.8M saved over the remaining term.
The client — a US streaming media group with global encoding and CDN workloads — had signed a three-year AWS EDP in mid-2024 with a $54M total commit. Eighteen months in, actual run-rate was tracking 14% below the curve. A combination of architecture changes (move from a managed Elasticsearch pattern to OpenSearch self-hosting), and a successful workload-rationalisation programme had reduced consumption faster than the original commit modelling had anticipated.
AWS's account team had three responses on offer. First, attach more services — bring a brand-new generative AI workload onto Bedrock at premium rates to consume against the existing commit. Second, extend the commit term to six years in exchange for a one-time discount kicker. Third, defer reconciliation and accept the burn-rate. None of these answered the underlying question: was the EDP commit still the right shape for the business?
In our experience across 340+ cloud engagements, AWS account teams will frame any mid-term restructuring conversation as a renegotiation of the EDP framework, which technically requires AWS list-management approval. That language is partially correct and almost always weaponised. There is a meaningful difference between renegotiating EDP commit dollars and restructuring how the commit is satisfied — Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, services, AWS Marketplace third-party software, support tier. The second conversation does not require any framework change.
You probably have more room to restructure than your account team is showing you.
The customer's Savings Plan portfolio had been stitched together quarter-by-quarter as the FinOps team responded to forecast updates. The result: a stack of overlapping commitments at different instance families, expiry curves, and discount tiers. We modelled the entire portfolio as a unified optimization problem and rebuilt it. The new portfolio retired three overlapping commitments early, traded short-dated Savings Plans for one-year flexible, and freed up 14% of the customer's annual EDP burn for re-deployment.
The original EDP had a Private Pricing Addendum (PPA) covering three workload families: encoding, CDN egress, and global S3 storage. We benchmarked each PPA line against current AWS Enterprise discount programmes for comparable workload patterns and identified 14 points of headroom across the three families. AWS approved 11 of those points in a single PPA refresh, with the remaining three deferred to the next-cycle renewal in exchange for a structured commit step-up.
The EDP commit itself was reduced 22% mid-term — from $54M total to $42M over the remaining nineteen months. This was structured as a "commit re-baseline" against actual usage data the customer had collected, rather than a renegotiation of the EDP framework. AWS's internal commercial approval ran four weeks. We sat through it in writing.
AWS EDPs are a more flexible instrument than most enterprises treat them as. The customer is told — implicitly — that the commitment is fixed and the only adjustments available are upward. That is not commercially true. AWS will restructure mid-term if the customer arrives with workload data, an alternative model, and the credibility to walk to a different cloud at next renewal. None of those are easy to build inside ninety days. All three are buildable inside nine months.
If you are mid-term on an EDP, MACC, or CUD commit and tracking under, the work to restructure starts now — not at the next renewal cycle. The Cloud Contract Negotiation Framework walks through the levers in detail.
The same modelling approach used on this engagement.
Our cloud practice is led by former AWS, Azure, and GCP commercial leads. We benchmark, model, and restructure cloud commits before renewal forces the conversation.
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