Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
Your AWS relationship runs on three documents. A click through customer agreement you never signed, a set of service terms AWS rewrites at will, and the private pricing addendum you negotiated. Only the third one is yours. And the order of precedence is worth knowing: the service terms outrank the customer agreement, and your addendum outranks both.
Everything you want protected has to live in the document you control.
The base agreement changes without notice. AWS may modify the agreement and its policies by posting a revised version, effective on posting. There are notice periods elsewhere, twelve months before removing material functionality, ninety days before an adverse SLA change, thirty days before raising fees on a service you already use. But for changing the contract itself, none.
The thirty day notice for materially adverse changes that people quote is a regional consumer provision, not a general right. So if a term matters to you, it belongs in your addendum where AWS cannot rewrite it unilaterally.
Service credits are compensation theatre. Across the major services the pattern is identical: ten percent credit for a modest miss, twenty five or thirty for a serious one, a hundred only when availability collapses. Credits apply to future charges for that service in that region, never as a refund. And they are not automatic.
You must detect the outage, calculate the uptime percentage, and file a claim within two billing cycles with your own logs documenting the errors. AWS's status page is not accepted as proof. Miss the window and even the credits vanish. Worse, there is no durability commitment at all.
The famous eleven nines is a design target, not a contractual promise, and there is no remedy anywhere for data loss. So negotiate automatic crediting, a chronic failure clause that opens a termination right rather than another coupon, and keep your own uptime record. And price the remedy against reality. A month of degraded service refunded as a few days of fees is not risk transfer, it is an apology with arithmetic.
If a service genuinely carries business risk for you, the protection you need is an exit right, not a credit.
Your data has a thirty day window with conditions. After termination AWS will not delete your content for thirty days and will let you retrieve it, but only if you have paid everything due, and the protection disappears entirely if AWS terminated you for cause. Operationally you get about ninety days before account closure deletes everything. And there are traps in the closing itself: Reserved Instances and Savings Plans keep invoicing after closure until they expire, marketplace subscriptions are not automatically cancelled, and closing the account is itself your notice of termination.
Free exit egress exists, which is genuinely useful, but it is a programme rather than a right. You apply through support, AWS reviews and issues credits, you get ninety days to complete the move, and repeat applications attract scrutiny. It helps you move the data. It does nothing about a live spend commitment.
The AI default is opt in, and it has spread. AWS AI services may use and store customer content for service improvement including model training, possibly in a different region than the one you chose, unless you opt out through an organisations policy. And read the covered list, because it is no longer just AI products. It now reaches into observability and security tooling that most enterprises run without ever considering themselves AI customers.
Set the opt out policy at the organisation root on day one. It is free, it takes minutes, and opting out also deletes the historical content already shared. One more clause worth naming because it is quietly expensive. AWS charges support as a percentage of gross spend, and the standard template also takes a logo licence that survives termination and a preferred provider commitment binding your public and private statements.
None of those are priced, all of them are tradeable, and buyers hand them over for nothing every year.
Regulation is not coming to rescue you. The UK competition regulator spent a year examining this market, specifically looked at committed spend agreements, and concluded that in their current form they do not harm competition. It then declined to open the follow up investigations into the two largest providers. Under one percent of cloud customers switch provider in a year, and both the regulator and your account team know that number.
The useful reading is not despair, it is clarity: nothing about your commitment is going to be regulated away, so every protection you want has to be negotiated into your own paper, at signature, while you still have something they want.
One last point. At Redress Compliance we redline these agreements for a living, on pure contingency: twenty five percent of what we save you. If we save you nothing, you pay nothing. Next episode: running the estate between renewals, where the savings either compound or quietly evaporate.
Redress Compliance works on contingency: our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. Nothing saved, nothing paid. Independent, buyer side only, never vendor funded. Want Redress to contact you? Reach out and we respond the same day.
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