Commitment coverage without painting yourself into a corner

Commitments are the largest single discount available on infrastructure, and the easiest to get wrong. Buy too little and you leave money on the table; buy too much, or commit to the wrong shape, and you are locked into paying for capacity you no longer use.

#Commit to the floor, not the average

Usage has a shape: a durable baseline that runs no matter what, and a variable layer on top that rises and falls. Commitments should cover the floor — the capacity you are certain to run for the full term — and nothing above it. Committing to the average means committing to usage that is sometimes not there, which is how coverage turns into waste.

#Sequence the levers first

The worst commitment is a discount on something you were about to delete or shrink. That is why commit comes after retire and rightsize: you commit to the baseline you actually need, measured after the cleanup, not the inflated one you inherited. Buying coverage on un-optimized usage locks the waste in for a year.

#Coverage is a moving target

A baseline is not static. Workloads grow, migrate, and retire; a commitment that fit perfectly in January can be over-bought by June. Coverage has to be watched and topped up incrementally as the durable floor rises — laddering smaller commitments over time rather than making one large bet that ages badly.

#Flexibility above the floor

The point of covering only the baseline is that everything above it stays on-demand, where it can scale to zero, move regions, or change shape without stranding a commitment. The goal is not maximum coverage — it is the highest coverage you can hold without losing the ability to keep optimizing. Discount on the floor, freedom above it.

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