RI portfolio restructure: $4.2M across 420 line items.

The customer had grown through acquisition. Three of the acquired businesses had brought their own AWS environments and their own Reserved Instance portfolios. By the time the integration project rolled the environments under a single payer, the consolidated RI footprint was 420 individual line items spanning seven instance families, three regions, and a mix of Standard and Convertible terms with overlapping expiration dates.

The customer had a clear preference for Reserved Instances over Savings Plans at the executive level — partly cultural, partly because finance leadership preferred the predictability of fixed line items on the bill. The engagement was scoped accordingly: keep RIs as the dominant commitment vehicle where they make sense, but rationalize the portfolio and add Savings Plans only where the math clearly justified it.

What the customer needed

• A unified view of the full RI portfolio with utilization data on every line
• An exchange plan for the Convertible RIs that no longer matched current workloads
• A Marketplace exit strategy for Standard RIs with material time remaining that no longer made sense
• A go-forward purchasing framework that prevented the same fragmentation from recurring

RI portfolio restructure is largely a sequencing problem. Each RI exchange or Marketplace sale has implications for the rest of the portfolio. A bad sequence can leave coverage gaps for weeks and cost more in on-demand than the restructure saves.

Phase 1 — Portfolio audit (weeks 1-2)

We catalogued all 420 line items: family, region, term, payment option, expiration date, and last 90 days of attribution. We then matched the portfolio against actual instance consumption over the same 18-month window. Of the 420 lines, 187 were fully utilized, 134 were partially utilized, 79 were attributed below 40 percent, and 20 had expired and quietly rolled to on-demand.

Phase 2 — Convertible exchange plan (weeks 3-4)

The 134 partially-utilized RIs were almost all Convertibles purchased during the integration of the acquired businesses. We modeled the optimal exchange targets — new instance families that matched current consumption — and built the exchange sequence to avoid overlap or gap. AWS's Convertible RI exchange is a one-shot operation per line; getting it wrong is costly. Forty-eight exchanges were executed over a two-week window.

Phase 3 — Marketplace exits and Savings Plan layer (weeks 5-7)

The 79 under-attributed RIs were largely Standard term with 8 to 22 months remaining. We listed 41 on the RI Marketplace; 34 sold within three weeks at an average of 73 percent of remaining contract value, recovering $1.1M. Underneath the rationalized RI portfolio, we layered a modest Compute Savings Plan to cover the steady-state load that no longer made sense as RIs.

Phase 4 — Governance (week 8)

We installed a quarterly RI review process with the FinOps team, tied to the customer's existing reporting cadence. New RI or Savings Plan purchases require a documented coverage model against the unified consumption baseline.

The restructured portfolio produced $4.2M in three-year savings against the trajectory the customer was on before the engagement. The savings break across four buckets.

Where the savings came from

• Coverage rationalization — $1.8M by eliminating the on-demand premium on workloads that were running 24/7 but uncovered, and by retiring RIs whose workloads no longer existed
• Convertible exchanges — $1.0M from matching 48 Convertible RIs to current instance families instead of the legacy families they had been purchased against
• Marketplace recovery — $1.1M from selling 34 RIs that no longer fit, recovering most of the residual value instead of writing it off
• Savings Plan overlay — $0.3M from a modest Compute Savings Plan layer underneath the rationalized RI structure

What the customer did with the savings

The freed budget absorbed compute growth from two new product lines without requiring a budget revision. The CFO has cited the engagement in the company's quarterly earnings call as an example of operational discipline; the savings are documented in the company's public capital allocation framework.

The quarterly review process is the long-lived change. The portfolio has stayed within the target structure since closing, and no new acquisitions have been allowed to introduce un-rationalized RI inventory.