Cloud Cost & FinOps Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the cloud cost and FinOps terms teams ask about most, from rightsizing and chargeback to Shift-Left FinOps, GitOps, GPU cost optimization, and cloud waste.
FinOps
An operational practice that brings financial accountability to variable cloud spend.
Cloud cost optimization
The ongoing process of reducing cloud spend while preserving performance and reliability.
Rightsizing
Matching the size of a cloud resource to the workload's actual demand.
Showback and chargeback
Two models for attributing cloud costs to the teams that incur them.
Success-fee FinOps pricing
Paying for cloud savings only when they are actually delivered.
Infrastructure-as-Code pull request
Applying a cloud change as reviewable, version-controlled code.
Cloud cost anomaly detection
Automatically catching unexpected spend spikes before the bill arrives.
Cost guardrails
Automated policies that prevent overspending before resources are deployed.
Kubernetes pod rightsizing
Aligning a pod's CPU and memory requests with its real usage.
Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
Commitment-based discounts for steady-state cloud usage.
P95 utilization
The 95th-percentile usage level used to size resources with headroom.
Idle and orphaned cloud resources
Provisioned resources that are unused but still billed.
Shift-Left FinOps
Bringing cloud cost feedback into development time, before the spend happens.
GitOps
Managing infrastructure through Git as the single source of truth.
Configuration drift
When live infrastructure no longer matches its infrastructure-as-code definition.
Kubernetes node optimization
Cutting the cost of the compute that runs your pods, not just the pods.
Spot instances
Spare cloud capacity at a steep discount that can be reclaimed at short notice.
Cloud waste
Cloud spend that delivers no value: idle, over-provisioned, or forgotten resources.
GPU cost optimization
Reducing the cost of the GPU compute that powers AI and machine-learning workloads.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
An open standard that lets AI agents pull live cost data into the development loop.
Cloud pricing models
The main ways clouds charge for resources, from on-demand to commitments and spot.
FinOps Framework
The Inform, Optimize, and Operate phases that structure a FinOps practice.
Amortized cost
Spreading upfront commitment costs evenly across the period they cover.
Egress and data transfer costs
Charges for moving data between zones, regions, or out to the internet.
Cloud cost forecasting
Predicting future cloud spend from historical usage and planned changes.
Commitment coverage and utilization
Two metrics that show how well your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans are working.
Kubernetes cost allocation
Attributing shared cluster costs to the teams, namespaces, and workloads that use them.
Karpenter
An open-source Kubernetes node provisioner that optimizes compute in real time.