Cloud cost management has its own precise vocabulary. Practise the collocations FinOps practitioners use when reducing and governing cloud spend.
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Fill in: 'The FinOps team audited all EC2 instances to ___ them to the correct instance types.'
We 'right-size resources' — 'right-size' is the FinOps and cloud-optimisation standard collocation for matching resource capacity precisely to workload requirements. 'Resize' implies any change in size; 'downsize' implies only reduction; 'adjust' is too vague.
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Fill in: 'The cloud cost dashboard helps engineers ___ waste such as idle load balancers and unattached volumes.'
We 'spot waste' — 'spot' collocates naturally with 'waste' in cost-optimisation language, meaning to notice inefficiencies quickly. 'Find waste' and 'identify waste' are acceptable; 'detect waste' is more suited to automated monitoring tools than to human engineers reviewing dashboards.
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Fill in: 'Moving batch jobs to Spot Instances helped us ___ compute spend by 60%.'
We 'optimise spend' — 'optimise spend' is the FinOps collocation for achieving the best value from cloud expenditure, not just cutting costs. 'Reduce spend' and 'cut spend' focus purely on reduction; 'lower spend' is informal and misses the efficiency connotation.
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Fill in: 'We decided to ___ Reserved Instances for the steady-state workloads to lock in a 40% discount.'
We 'commit to reserved instances' — AWS and other cloud providers use 'commit to' as the formal collocation for entering a usage commitment in exchange for discounted pricing. 'Buy reserved instances' is informal; 'purchase' is used in billing but not in the optimisation decision context; 'use' is too vague.
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Fill in: 'The platform team configured AWS Budgets to ___ budget alerts when monthly spend exceeds $10,000.'
We 'set budget alerts' — 'set' is the standard collocation for establishing alert thresholds in cloud cost tools. 'Create budget alerts' is also common; 'define' is more abstract; 'configure budget alerts' is acceptable but 'set' is the more idiomatic and concise choice in FinOps language.