The Client
A leading online services company headquartered in Germany, with over 10,000 employees and operations across Europe. The company's platform served millions of users daily, relying on AWS as its core infrastructure provider for hosting, data analytics, and content delivery via services including EC2, S3, CloudFront, and a range of analytics and AI tools.
The Challenge
Despite AWS's central role in powering the platform, the existing agreement had evolved into a significant cost burden with limited visibility into where money was actually going. Four critical pressure points demanded expert intervention:
| Challenge Area | Description | Business Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Exponential Cost Growth | Platform usage and data storage growing faster than revenue, driving uncontrolled AWS spend increases | Cloud infrastructure costs consuming an ever-larger share of operating budget |
| Poor Utilisation Visibility | No centralised view of which resources were overprovisioned, idle, or misallocated across teams | Engineering teams provisioning independently without cost accountability |
| Service Misalignment | AWS services purchased didn't match evolving operational priorities — paying for capabilities not driving value | Budget allocated to low-ROI services while high-priority workloads lacked optimisation |
| Rigid Contract Terms | No mechanism to scale resources dynamically based on seasonal traffic patterns or user demand spikes | Overprovisioned during quiet periods, under-resourced during peaks |
Digital platforms with millions of daily active users accumulate AWS resources organically. Engineering teams spin up EC2 instances, create S3 buckets, and purchase Reserved Instances independently. Without centralised governance and periodic right-sizing audits, this pattern typically results in 25 to 40 percent overspend before any EDP or commercial negotiation even begins.
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The Redress Compliance Approach
Redress Compliance conducted a structured four-phase engagement designed to deliver both immediate cost reduction and sustainable long-term governance. Our approach combined forensic usage analysis, independent market benchmarking, and direct negotiation with AWS's enterprise sales team.
Full analysis of all AWS services consumed across the estate, including EC2 instance families, Reserved Instance coverage gaps, S3 storage tiers, CloudFront data transfer costs, and idle or underutilised resources. Identified over €1.2 million in waste from provisioned-but-unused resources — particularly legacy EC2 instances retained after project completions and oversized Reserved Instances purchased against outdated growth forecasts.
Systematic right-sizing of EC2 instances across compute-intensive workloads, transitioning oversized instances to more appropriate families without performance degradation. Reserved Instance portfolio was restructured to align with actual workload patterns rather than peak projections. Savings Plans were introduced for flexible compute workloads with variable demand profiles. The annual Reserved Instance strategy alone delivered €780,000 in year-one savings.
Independent benchmarking against comparable European digital platforms revealed the client was paying 18 to 24 percent above market rate for equivalent EDP commitments. This benchmarking data underpinned the negotiation strategy: concrete pricing comparisons, credible walk-away scenarios, and a structured counter-proposal with tiered commitment levels reflecting the client's actual consumption trajectory rather than AWS's projected growth assumptions.
Direct negotiation with AWS's enterprise commercial team delivered a restructured EDP with improved discount tiers, seasonal scaling provisions, and quarterly true-up flexibility to prevent over-commitment during lower-traffic periods. A governance framework was implemented to prevent future cost drift, including tagging policies, budget alerts, and a quarterly review cadence with internal engineering leads.
Optimisation Strategy: What Changed
EC2 Right-Sizing
The client's EC2 fleet had grown without systematic review. Many instances were sized for peak traffic scenarios that materialised infrequently. Right-sizing analysis identified 340 EC2 instances across the estate that could be moved to smaller instance families or Graviton-based processors without degrading application performance. Annual compute savings from right-sizing alone exceeded €520,000.
Reserved Instance Portfolio Restructuring
The existing Reserved Instance portfolio was misaligned with actual consumption patterns. The client held significant 3-year Standard RIs for instance types that engineering teams had migrated away from, while new workload families ran entirely on On-Demand pricing. The restructured RI portfolio combined 1-year Convertible RIs for flexible workloads and 3-year Standard RIs for stable baseline compute, reducing On-Demand exposure by 68 percent.
S3 and Data Transfer Optimisation
Content delivery costs were disproportionately high relative to data volumes. Analysis identified S3 Intelligent-Tiering as appropriate for a significant portion of the object storage estate, and CloudFront configuration changes reduced origin pull costs by aligning cache TTLs with actual content update frequency. Combined S3 and data transfer optimisations delivered €290,000 in annual savings.
EDP Renegotiation
The renegotiated Enterprise Discount Programme provided improved commercial terms across all AWS services, with tiered discount structures rewarding growth while protecting the client against over-commitment penalties during periods of platform demand normalisation. Seasonal traffic provisions allowed commitment adjustments on a quarterly basis.
Detailed Results
Financial Impact
The engagement delivered €4.5 million in total savings over the three-year contract term, representing a 27 percent reduction in annual AWS spend. Year-one savings of €1.65 million included both immediate quick wins from idle resource decommissioning and structural savings from the right-sizing and Reserved Instance restructuring. Years two and three delivered compounding savings as governance discipline prevented cost drift and the improved EDP discount tiers kicked in at higher utilisation thresholds.
Enhanced Contract Flexibility
The renegotiated contract included provisions not present in the client's prior EDP, including quarterly commitment review windows, seasonal scaling allowances tied to documented traffic patterns, and convertible Reserved Instance flexibility to adapt to technology migrations. These provisions protect the client against future technology shifts, such as container-based architectures or migration of workloads to AWS-managed services.
Operational Improvements
The governance framework implemented during the engagement established tagging standards, cost centre attribution, and monthly spend reporting by engineering team. Within 90 days of implementation, 94 percent of AWS spend was attributed to specific cost centres, compared with less than 40 percent previously. Engineering teams gained visibility into the cost impact of provisioning decisions in real time, changing procurement behaviour without requiring additional tooling investment.
Key Recommendations for High-Traffic Digital Platforms
AWS cost optimisation for high-traffic digital platforms requires a different approach from traditional enterprise IT. The platform's AWS investment strategy should treat cloud spend as a variable cost that requires active management, with governance mechanisms that match the speed of engineering provisioning decisions.
- Conduct a full Reserved Instance and Savings Plan audit every six months — not at renewal time only
- Implement instance family migration triggers when AWS releases new generation instances with better price-performance ratios
- Build seasonal traffic patterns into EDP commitment structures from the outset rather than negotiating exceptions retrospectively
- Establish tagging enforcement as a prerequisite for resource provisioning, not a retrospective clean-up exercise
- Benchmark EDP pricing against market data before accepting renewal proposals — AWS's opening position is rarely market rate for comparably sized customers
"The Redress team identified savings we genuinely did not believe existed. The governance framework they put in place changed how our engineering teams think about cloud spend. We are now managing AWS as a strategic commercial relationship, not just a utility bill."
Head of Infrastructure · German Online Services Platform
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Related AWS Resources
For more context on how we approach AWS contract negotiations for European enterprises, explore our AWS advisory services overview. You can also review the AWS case study for a global media company and the AWS case study for a Midwestern US bank for comparison across different industries and use cases.
To download our AWS EDP negotiation framework, visit the AWS EDP Negotiation Download page. Our broader cloud advisory expertise also covers Google Cloud and multi-cloud spend optimisation through our white paper library.