Apptio Cloudability flashcards
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32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- FinOps lifecycle phases
- Inform, Optimize, and Operate run as a continuous loop: visibility enables action, action is measured, and results feed the next cycle of decisions.
- Showback vs chargeback
- Showback reports cost to a team for awareness without financial impact; chargeback transfers the actual cost into that team's budget or P&L.
- Amortized cost
- The upfront or recurring commitment fee spread evenly across the commitment term, so each period carries its true share of the discount.
- Unblended cost
- The rate actually charged for usage at the moment it occurred, before spreading commitment fees across the term.
- Unit cost formula
- Total cloud spend for a scope divided by the business volume it supports, such as transactions, active users, or orders.
- Budget variance percentage
- Actual spend minus budgeted spend, divided by budgeted spend; a positive result indicates overspend relative to plan.
- Allocation completeness metric
- The share of total cloud cost mapped to an owner through tags or account structure; the remainder is untagged and ungoverned.
- Fully loaded cloud cost
- Infrastructure plus support, licensing, and allocated shared platform overhead, giving the true cost a consuming team imposes.
- Rightsizing decision rule
- Downsize when sustained utilization over a representative window stays well below the current instance size threshold, after checking memory and burst needs.
- Idle resource examples
- Unattached storage volumes, unused elastic IP addresses, orphaned snapshots, and stopped instances that still bill for attached storage.
- Commitment coverage
- The portion of eligible on-demand spend covered by savings plans or reserved instances; target the steady-state baseline rather than peak usage.
- Commitment utilization
- The portion of purchased commitment actually consumed; low utilization alongside high coverage indicates over-purchase of commitments.
- Spot capacity trade-off
- Deepest discount but interruptible capacity; appropriate for fault-tolerant batch and stateless workloads, not stateful production systems.
- Storage lifecycle policy
- Rules that move aging data to cheaper storage tiers; savings must exceed retrieval fees and minimum-duration charges.
- Cost anomaly detection
- Flags spend that deviates from a learned baseline; the runbook is triage, notify owner, find root cause, then remediate.
- Savings per unit of effort
- Estimated monthly savings divided by implementation effort, used to rank optimization opportunities for the engineering backlog.
- Mandatory tagging keys
- A policy-defined set such as owner, cost center, environment, and application that every resource must carry for allocation to work.
- Account as allocation boundary
- Cloud account or subscription structure is the primary cost boundary; the organizational hierarchy should mirror the business hierarchy.
- Budget alert threshold
- A percentage of budget or forecast that triggers notification; each alert needs a named owner and a documented response runbook.
- Budget action guardrail
- An automated response to a budget breach, such as notifying owners or restricting new spend, applied at account or platform level.
- Shared cost allocation method
- The documented rule for splitting common platform cost, such as proportional to usage, equal split, or a fixed percentage.
- Tag propagation delay
- Newly applied cost allocation tags can take up to about a day to appear in billing data, so reporting lags tagging changes.
- FinOps center of excellence
- A cross-functional group that owns cost standards, reviews exceptions, and runs a recurring monthly cost review cadence.
- Policy exception expiry
- Every governance exception carries an owner, a justification, and an end date so temporary waivers do not become permanent leakage.
- Gross margin per unit
- Revenue per unit minus cloud cost per unit, divided by revenue per unit; track the trend rather than a single period.
- Cost per transaction
- Cloud cost attributable to a workload divided by the number of transactions it processed in the same period.
- Cost per active user
- Total cloud cost divided by monthly active users, ideally segmented by cohort so averages do not hide divergent behavior.
- Economies of scale test
- Fixed platform cost spread over growing volume should lower unit cost; rising unit cost while volume grows signals inefficiency.
- Cost allocation driver
- A measurable basis such as requests, CPU-hours, or storage gigabytes used to distribute shared cost to consuming units.
- Break-even unit volume
- Fixed cloud cost divided by the difference between revenue per unit and variable cloud cost per unit; units needed to cover fixed cost.
- Unit cost versus price
- When cloud cost per unit approaches price per unit, margin erodes and either pricing or architecture must change.
- Absolute spend versus unit cost
- A rising total bill alongside falling unit cost can reflect healthy growth; report both so scale is not mistaken for waste.