Cloud Cost Management Terminology

Question 1

The information used to categorize costs and is encapsulated within CSP constructs like resource tags (AWS; Azure) or labels (GCP). In this context, metadata can be differentiated between “Resource Metadata” where an individual resource is tagged or labelled or “Hierarchy Metadata” where categorization is applied to some other construct that provides grouping of resources. Examples of allocation metadata include:

GCP “labels” and “billing accounts”;
AWS “resource tags”, “Linked Accounts” and “Organizations”;
Azure “Subscriptions”, “Resource Groups” and “resource tags”

Answer 1

Allocation Metadata

(Cloud Cost Management Terminology)

Question 2

Each CSP provides customers the ability to discount on demand rates for cloud services used in exchange for a commitment to use minimum level of resources for a specified term. Depending on CSP and the cloud services used, the commitment may be based on the upfront payment for a certain number of resource units, time units or monetary value, with various payment options and timeframes. Examples of commitment based discounts include:

GCP “Committed Use Discount” (CUD) for Compute Engine and “Reservations” for BigQuery
AWS “Reserved Instance” (RI) for EC2 and “Savings Plans” (SP) for SageMaker
Azure “Reserved instances” (RI) for VMs

Answer 2

Commitment Based Discount

(Cloud Cost Management Terminology)

Question 3

The datasource to which CSPs publish and from which native cost data can be derived when billable cloud services are consumed. Examples of datasources include:

AWS CUR (Cost & Usage Report)
Azure Consumption API; Azure Cost Management Exports
GCP BigQuery Cloud Billing Data Tables; GCP Cloud Billing Report

Answer 3

Cost & Usage Data

(Cloud Cost Management Terminology)

Question 4

a generic term used to describe any service or instance of a service purchased from a cloud service provider

Answer 4

Resources

(Cloud Cost Management Terminology)

Question 5

the amount of a commitment-based discount that went unused for a given timeframe

Answer 5

Vacancy

(Cloud Cost Management Terminology)

Question 6

Any usage or cost of resources which provide no value to an organization

Answer 6

Waste

(Cloud Cost Management Terminology)