FinOps Vocabulary | Cloud FinOps Exercises

1 / 5

A FinOps team lead announces: "We are currently at the 'Crawl' stage of the FinOps maturity model."

What does the Crawl stage mean?

FinOps maturity model (FinOps Foundation): Crawl → Walk → Run is the standard three-stage progression.

Stage	Characteristics
Crawl	Basic visibility (billing dashboard), some cost allocation, ad-hoc optimisation, no consistent process or accountability
Walk	Consistent process, teams aware of costs, automation beginning, showback in place
Run	Automated governance, optimisation embedded in engineering workflow, unit economics tracked

Key vocabulary: "FinOps maturity", "crawl/walk/run", "cost visibility", "FinOps Foundation".

2 / 5

An engineering team reports: "The FinOps team is now tracking unit economics for the platform."

What are unit economics in a cloud cost management context?

Unit economics = cost per unit of value. Normalising cloud spend to a business metric reveals efficiency trends independent of scale.

Business driver	Unit metric example
SaaS product	Cost per customer / DAU
Fintech / e-commerce	Cost per transaction
AI/ML platform	Cost per inference
Data platform	Cost per GB processed

Key vocabulary: "unit economics", "cost per unit", "efficiency ratio", "business value attribution", "unit cost trending".

3 / 5

The FinOps team has been tasked with increasing cloud cost visibility.

What is the first and most important step to achieve this?

Tagging strategy is the foundation of FinOps. Without tags it is impossible to know who owns which spend or attribute costs to teams and products.

Example tag set: team:payments, env:production, product:checkout, cost-centre:engineering

Cloud provider	Tag enforcement tool
AWS	AWS Tag Policies (via AWS Organizations)
Azure	Azure Policy (enforce tag presence on resources)
GCP	Resource Manager labels with organisation policy

Key vocabulary: "tagging strategy", "resource tags", "cost visibility foundation", "tag policy", "tag enforcer (AWS Tag Policy, Azure Policy)".

4 / 5

The CFO requests: "Can you prepare a showback report for all engineering teams?"

What is a cloud showback report?

Showback provides visibility without financial consequence. Chargeback actually debits the team's budget.

Model	Money moves?	Purpose
Showback	No	Awareness, accountability
Chargeback	Yes	Financial accountability

Key vocabulary: "showback", "chargeback", "cost attribution", "FinOps accountability model".

5 / 5

A FinOps review item states: "The team identified significant cloud cost waste."

Which of the following is typically classified as cloud waste?

Cloud waste is spend on resources that deliver no business value. Common categories:

Waste type	Example
Idle resources	Stopped EC2 + attached EBS, forgotten dev environments running 24/7
Orphaned resources	Unattached Elastic IPs, detached EBS volumes, unused snapshots
Oversized instances	8% average CPU on m5.4xlarge — rightsizing opportunity
Non-prod 24/7	Dev/test running overnight and weekends with no users

Key vocabulary: "idle resource", "orphaned resource", "rightsizing opportunity", "cloud waste", "cost zombie".