Cloud cost management is increasingly a core engineering responsibility. FinOps discussions involve allocating costs to teams, presenting breakdowns to leadership, and identifying optimisation opportunities. This exercise covers the natural collocations used in quarterly cost reviews, architecture discussions, and cloud governance meetings.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Engineering leadership wants to ___ cloud costs to individual product teams for accountability.
Allocate costs is the standard FinOps and engineering finance collocation — cost allocation is the formal process of attributing cloud spend to business units. 'Assign' and 'charge' are also used; 'distribute' implies equal splitting rather than usage-based attribution.
2 / 5
The FinOps team identified that three unused S3 buckets were ___ significant monthly spend.
Generating spend is the natural cloud cost collocation — infrastructure resources 'generate' costs. 'Causing' is also natural; 'creating' and 'producing' are less idiomatic in FinOps language. 'Generating spend' or 'generating cost' is the preferred phrasing in cloud cost reports.
3 / 5
The platform team should ___ a cost breakdown by service tier in the quarterly review.
Present a cost breakdown is the professional collocation in financial and engineering reviews — data is 'presented' formally to stakeholders. 'Show' and 'share' are acceptable but informal; 'give a breakdown' is also natural but 'present' is the standard verb for structured reporting.
4 / 5
Teams are encouraged to ___ reserved instances to reduce compute costs by up to 40 percent.
Purchase reserved instances is the correct FinOps collocation — reserved capacity is formally 'purchased' as a commitment. 'Buy' is informal; 'acquire' is overly formal; 'use' doesn't capture the upfront commitment model that reserved instances represent.
5 / 5
The architecture review uncovered several opportunities to ___ compute costs through right-sizing.
Reduce compute costs is the most natural collocation in cloud cost optimisation discussions — 'reduce' implies a deliberate, measured reduction through engineering effort. 'Cut' implies abrupt elimination; 'lower' and 'decrease' are accurate but 'reduce' is the preferred FinOps verb in strategic discussions.