As cloud spend grows, FinOps vocabulary becomes essential for engineers. Rightsize the instances, reserve capacity, and track spend are the specific collocations used in cost management conversations with finance and leadership. Build fluency with these exercises.
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1 / 5
The finance team challenged engineering to ___ by 20% without impacting performance.
Reduce cloud costs is the standard FinOps and cloud management collocation. 'Reduce' is the professional verb in cost management reports and cloud provider documentation. 'Cut' is informal; 'lower' and 'decrease' are acceptable but 'reduce' is the most common in technical and business contexts.
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The cloud architect recommended a review to ___ that were overprovisioned.
Rightsize the instances is the specific FinOps collocation meaning to match instance size to actual workload needs. 'Rightsizing' is a defined practice in AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Advisor, and GCP Recommender. 'Resize' is generic; 'downsize' implies only reducing, not optimising.
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For predictable workloads, it is more cost-effective to ___ than to pay on-demand prices.
Reserve capacity is the standard cloud cost collocation. AWS Reserved Instances, Azure Reserved VM Instances, and GCP Committed Use Discounts all use 'reserve' as the core verb. This collocation signals a commitment in exchange for discounted pricing.
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The batch processing jobs were moved to ___ to take advantage of surplus compute at a lower price.
Use spot instances is the correct collocation in AWS terminology (GCP calls them 'preemptible', Azure 'spot VMs', but 'spot instances' is the widely understood industry term). It refers to purchasing unused cloud capacity at significant discounts.
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The team set up a cost dashboard to ___ across all departments and identify anomalies.
Track spend is the standard FinOps collocation for monitoring cloud expenditure over time. 'Track' implies ongoing measurement against a target or budget. 'Monitor' is also correct, but 'track spend' is the more common collocation in cloud cost management and FinOps frameworks.