Infrastructure Cost Review Language: English Collocations
Cloud infrastructure cost management — FinOps — has become a core discipline for engineering organisations. From right-sizing instances and forecasting costs to implementing chargeback models and optimising spending, infrastructure cost reviews have their own precise vocabulary. This exercise covers the collocations used by FinOps practitioners, cloud architects, and engineering leaders in cost governance discussions.
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The FinOps team worked with engineering leads to ___ oversized EC2 instances that were running at 5% average CPU utilisation.
Right-size instances is the canonical FinOps and cloud cost optimisation collocation — 'right-sizing' means matching resource allocation to actual usage. 'Downsize' implies only reducing, not optimising; 'reduce' and 'shrink' focus on reduction rather than fit. 'Right-size' is the specific term in cloud cost reviews for matching instance types to workload requirements.
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The cloud architect used historical usage data to ___ infrastructure costs for the next financial year.
Forecast infrastructure costs is the standard FinOps and IT finance collocation — costs are 'forecast' using historical trends and planned capacity changes. 'Predict' sounds less data-driven; 'estimate' implies less precision; 'calculate' implies a precise formula. 'Forecast' is the standard term in financial planning for data-driven future cost projections.
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The FinOps programme implemented a ___ model to allocate cloud costs back to the business units that consumed them.
Chargeback model is the precise FinOps cost governance collocation — chargebacks allocate cloud costs to the teams or business units responsible for generating them. 'Allocation' is a broader financial term; 'billing' refers to the invoice; 'cost model' is too general. 'Chargeback' is the canonical FinOps term for the mechanism of attributing shared infrastructure costs to consuming business units.
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The engineering leadership team reviewed the cloud bill and identified several opportunities to ___ infrastructure spending.
Optimise infrastructure spending is the standard FinOps and cloud cost review collocation — the goal is to 'optimise' for maximum value, not just to cut costs. 'Reduce' and 'cut' imply only downward movement; 'lower' is informal. 'Optimise' implies a data-driven approach that may involve both reducing waste and increasing efficiency.
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The FinOps lead asked engineering teams to tag all cloud resources so costs could be ___ to individual products and services.
Allocated to products is the standard cloud cost governance collocation — tagged resources allow costs to be 'allocated' to the correct cost centres, teams, or products. 'Attributed' is also correct and used in attribution analysis; 'assigned' is too general; 'linked' is informal. 'Allocate' is the standard FinOps and finance term for distributing shared costs across responsible entities.