Cloud cost management has a specialized vocabulary used by FinOps teams and platform engineers. Collocations like right-size resources and identify waste are central to AWS, Azure, and GCP cost reviews.
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The platform team launched a FinOps initiative to ___ cloud spend by 20% this quarter.
Reduce spend is the standard FinOps and cloud cost collocation. While 'cut' and 'lower' are used, reduce spend is the neutral, professional phrasing found in cloud vendor documentation, FinOps frameworks, and engineering blog posts. It implies a measured, deliberate effort rather than an abrupt cut.
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Engineers audited EC2 instances to ___ resources that were over-provisioned for their actual workload.
Right-size resources is the fixed cloud cost collocation for matching instance types and sizes to actual usage patterns. 'Resize' is a manual, technical action. 'Scale' is for handling load. 'Adjust' is too vague. Right-size is the FinOps term that appears in AWS, Azure, and GCP cost optimization recommendations.
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A cloud cost report helped the team ___ waste such as idle VMs and unused storage buckets.
Identify waste is the FinOps collocation for pinpointing unnecessary cloud expenditure. 'Find' is informal. 'Detect' implies automated anomaly detection. 'Spot' is informal. Identify waste is the standard phrase in cloud cost reviews, matching the 'eliminate waste' language in Lean and FinOps methodologies.
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The finance team worked with cloud architects to ___ monthly budgets per team and workload.
Set budgets is the natural collocation for establishing financial limits for cloud consumption. 'Create' is too broad. 'Establish' is more formal. 'Define' focuses on specification. Set budgets is the idiomatic phrase used in AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, and GCP Billing when configuring spending thresholds.
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The architecture review board recommended switching to spot instances to ___ usage costs.
Optimise usage is the cloud efficiency collocation meaning to get the best value from cloud resources through intelligent configuration. 'Reduce' focuses only on decreasing. 'Minimise' can mean cutting too much. 'Control' is for governance. Optimise usage balances cost with performance — the central goal of cloud cost management.