# FinOps Glossary

Explore key FinOps and cloud cost management terms, from foundational concepts to advanced optimization strategies.

## A

### [AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/aws-cost-usage-report.html)

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the most detailed source of billing and usage data available in AWS. It provides a line-by-line breakdown of every charge on an account, down to individual resources, and serves as the primary data source for most serious AWS cost management and allocation work.

### [Azure Reservations](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/azure-reservations.html)

Azure Reservations offer discounts on specific Azure resources, from virtual machines to databases, in exchange for a one or three year commitment. The discount applies automatically to matching usage once purchased, without changes to existing workloads.

## C

### [Chargeback](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/chargeback.html)

A chargeback is a cloud cost management practice where teams or departments are billed for the cloud resources they consume. Unlike a showback, a chargeback moves actual money. Costs are transferred internally to the team or business unit responsible for generating them.

### [Cloud egress costs](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/cloud-egress-costs.html)

Cloud egress costs, sometimes referred to as cloud data transfer costs, are charges incurred when data moves out of a cloud provider's network. Ingress is typically free. Egress costs are easy to overlook but can become a significant line item as application traffic and data volumes grow across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

### [Cost allocation tags](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/cost-allocation-tags.html)

Cost allocation tags are key-value labels attached to cloud resources that make it possible to track and attribute spend to specific teams, projects, environments, or business units. Tagging is the foundation of most cost allocation and chargeback practices across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

## G

### [GCP Billing export](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/gcp-billing-export.html)

GCP Billing export sends detailed cost and usage data to BigQuery or a Cloud Storage bucket for analysis. It is the GCP equivalent of the AWS Cost and Usage Report, providing granular resource-level data that goes beyond what the Google Cloud Console billing dashboard surfaces.

### [GCP Committed Use Discounts](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/gcp-committed-use-discounts.html)

GCP Committed Use Discounts are a pricing model that offers reduced rates on Compute Engine resources in exchange for committing to a minimum level of usage over one or three years. Available as resource-based or spend-based CUDs, with discounts of up to 57% compared to on-demand rates.

## I

### [Idle resources](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/idle-resources.html)

Idle resources are cloud infrastructure components that are provisioned and running but not performing any useful work. They consume compute, storage, or network capacity and generate costs without contributing to any active workload. Common examples include unused VMs, unattached volumes, and idle load balancers.

## R

### [Reserved Instances](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/reserved-instances.html)

Reserved Instances are an AWS pricing option that provides discounts on EC2 usage in exchange for committing to a specific instance type, region, and term length of one or three years. They offer deeper discounts than Savings Plans but require more specific upfront decisions.

### [Rightsizing](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/rightsizing.html)

Rightsizing is the process of matching cloud resource allocation to actual workload requirements, ensuring compute, memory, and storage are not more than a workload needs. Most cloud overspend comes from resources running fine on more hardware than the workload actually calls for.

## S

### [Savings Plans](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/savings-plans.html)

Savings Plans are a flexible AWS pricing model that provides a discount on compute usage in exchange for committing to a minimum hourly spend over one or three years. Unlike Reserved Instances, the commitment is to a dollar amount rather than specific instance types or regions.

### [Showback](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/showback.html)

A Showback is a cloud cost visibility practice where teams or departments can see how much of the organization's cloud spending is attributable to them, without being billed or charged for it. A showback builds cost awareness without the administrative overhead of internal billing.

### [Storage tiering](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/storage-tiering.html)

Storage tiering moves data between storage classes based on how frequently it is accessed. Cloud providers offer multiple tiers at different price points, from fast and expensive to slow and cheap. Most organizations automate this using lifecycle policies, so data moves down to lower cost tiers as it ages without manual intervention.

### [Spot Instances](https://www.manageengine.com/cloudspend/finops-glossary/spot-instances.html)

Spot Instances are spare compute capacity offered by cloud providers at up to 90% off on-demand rates. The trade-off is that capacity can be reclaimed with little notice when demand increases. They are best suited for fault-tolerant workloads like batch processing, CI/CD, and ML training jobs.