Glossary

Common terms and definitions used in FinOps and the neurals platform.

Anomaly Detection

The process of identifying unexpected changes in cloud spending patterns that may indicate waste or errors.

FinOps

Financial Operations. A cultural practice and operating model that brings financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud.

Governance

The set of policies, roles, and processes that control how an organization operates in the cloud to ensure compliance and security.

IaC (Infrastructure as Code)

The practice of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

RI (Reserved Instance)

A billing discount that allows you to save on Amazon EC2 usage costs by committing to a one-year or three-year term.

Rightsizing

The process of matching instance types and sizes to your workload performance and capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost.

Savings Plan

A flexible pricing model that offers lower prices compared to On-Demand pricing, in exchange for a specific usage commitment (measured in $/hour) for a one or three-year period.

Tagging

The practice of assigning metadata (key-value pairs) to cloud resources to categorize and track them for cost allocation and management.

Unit Economics

A method of measuring cloud spend against a business metric (e.g., cost per customer, cost per transaction) to understand the efficiency of cloud usage.

Waste

Cloud resources that are provisioned but not used or underutilized, resulting in unnecessary cost.