Cheat sheet · Specialise
Cloud cost and FinOps cheat sheet (Google Cloud)
Opens with creditsFor engineers, analysts and students learning FinOps on Google Cloud: billing reports, the BigQuery billing export, labels, committed and sustained use discounts, Spot VMs, Recommender and the FinOps hub, budgets and cost anomalies, Vertex AI and GPU spend, plus the FinOps Framework. The tool maps show the AWS and Azure names alongside.
Curated by Tauseef Fayyaz9 chapters79 concepts120 glossary termsChapters
9 chapters · 79 concepts
1How cloud billing worksWhat every line on a cloud bill is made of, how accounts or projects roll up into an invoice, the different kinds of cost, and a map of the cost tools on each provider.8 concepts
- 1Pricing unitsEvery charge is a quantity times a unit price: seconds or hours for compute, GB per month for storage, requests or invocations for serverless and APIs, GB for…
- 2Cloud Billing accounts and projectsResources live in projects; each project is linked to one Cloud Billing account that pays for it.
- 3List, contracted, billed and effective costList is the public price.
- 4Actual versus amortised costActual cost shows charges when they are billed, so an upfront commitment appears as one big charge.
- 5Hidden cost linesCharges compute-only estimates miss: data transfer, NAT gateways, load balancers, public IPv4 addresses, logs, snapshots, idle managed databases, marketplace…
- 6Billing data latencyCost data arrives in batches, hours behind usage, and a month keeps changing for a few days after it ends.
- 7Pricing calculatorsFree tools from each provider to estimate a design: every resource, size, hours, storage, requests and data transfer, with assumptions written down.
- 8Cost tools on each providerThe same FinOps job has a different tool name on each cloud.
8 in this chapterOpen this chapter2Reading the bill and taggingThe cost tool and detailed export on your cloud, tags and labels, a tagging policy template, enforcement, untaggable spend and your first billing query.8 concepts
- 1Cloud Billing reportsConsole reports of cost by project, service, SKU, location or label over time, with a forecast and options to include or exclude credits such as CUDs and SUDs.
- 2Billing export to BigQueryAutomatic export of billing data to BigQuery: standard usage cost, detailed (resource-level) usage cost, pricing data and a FOCUS dataset in preview as of…
- 3Tags and labels for costKey-value pairs on resources, such as team=payments, that flow into billing data so cost can be grouped by team, product, environment or cost centre.
- 4Tagging policyA short written agreement on required tag keys, allowed values, who owns each list, where tags are applied, how compliance is measured and what happens to…
- 5Tagging policy templateA starting template with five required keys, their allowed values, and how the policy is applied and measured.
- 6Labels in Google Cloud billingKey-value labels on projects and resources appear in billing reports and the BigQuery export.
- 7Untaggable and shared spendCost that cannot carry your tags: support, taxes, some data transfer, marketplace charges, centrally bought commitments and shared platforms.
- 8Billing queries in SQLSQL over a billing export answers what the console cannot: cost by tag and service, top resources, week-on-week change.
8 in this chapterOpen this chapter- Allocation, showback and unit costsTurning a tagged bill into numbers each team owns: structure first, shared cost splits, showback and chargeback, unit economics formulas and reports for each audience.9 conceptsOpens with credits
- Rate optimisation: commitments and spotPaying less for the same usage: how commitments work, coverage, utilisation and break-even, each provider's discount programmes, spot capacity and how to manage commitments over time.9 conceptsOpens with credits
- Usage optimisationUsing less: rightsizing, recommendations, idle and orphaned resources, schedules, storage tiers, data transfer, Kubernetes cost and logs, with a savings levers checklist.11 conceptsOpens with credits
- Forecasting, budgets and anomaliesSeeing spend coming: forecast methods, budgets and their limits, anomaly detection, routing alerts to owners and a runbook for investigating a spike.6 conceptsOpens with credits
- AI and GPU spendHow AI usage is billed and controlled: tokens, caching, batch, model choice, provisioned capacity, GPU utilisation and capacity, unit cost and allocation.9 conceptsOpens with credits
- The FinOps Framework and FOCUSThe FinOps Foundation's shared language (https://www.finops.org/framework/) and the FOCUS billing specification (https://focus.finops.org/).9 conceptsOpens with credits
- Working with finance and a FinOps careerFinance terms, month-end, the monthly cost review and its checklist, getting engineers to act, roles, certification, the 2026 job market and a portfolio.10 conceptsOpens with credits
- 10Glossary, A to ZEvery concept in the sheet and the smaller terms it uses, in one list.120 terms
About this sheet
Read the bill, cut waste, forecast spend.
Related on Sefism
Picked from the other libraries by shared topics.
Roadmaps
See allBest practices
See all- Kubernetes Best PracticesRun workloads on Kubernetes that schedule well, survive restarts and node drains, and stay locked down: resources, probes, PDBs, Pod Security and RBAC.
- Terraform Best PracticesWrite Terraform that teams can review and change safely: file layout, version pinning, remote state with locking, secrets, modules, refactoring and tests.
Checklists
See all- Cloud Cost Optimization ChecklistFinOps for engineers: tagging and allocation, budgets and anomaly alerts, rightsizing, scheduling, commitments, storage lifecycle, egress, idle resources and unit cost metrics.
- AWS Account Security ChecklistLock down an AWS account: root user, IAM Identity Center, roles instead of keys, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, S3 Block Public Access, IMDSv2 and guardrails.
- Incident Response ChecklistPrepare for and handle production incidents: on-call, severity levels, declaring, roles, mitigation, security containment, status updates and blameless postmortems.
Project structures
See all- Terraform project structureAn infrastructure repository for a small app on AWS: reusable modules, one folder per environment with its own remote state, pinned providers, tests and security scans, with plan on every pull request and apply from CI. For students who have finished the Terraform tutorials and want to know how a real team lays out the files. The same layout works unchanged with OpenTofu.
- Kubernetes with Helm project structureA Helm chart repository for one app: the chart that
helm creategives you, grown into a tested, versioned package with per-environment values, unit tests, install tests in a kind cluster and releases to an OCI registry. For students who can write a Deployment by hand and want to know how a team organises charts. It is about the repo layout and what each file does, not about cluster design. - Firebase (Cloud Functions and security rules) project structureFor students building an app on Firebase who need a real backend: Cloud Functions (2nd gen) in TypeScript, Firestore and Storage security rules with tests, and the Local Emulator Suite. The tree starts from
firebase initand grows into feature folders of callables, triggers and scheduled jobs, then adds CI deploys, environments, contract tests and runbooks.
Career questions
See all- Which cloud should I learn first: AWS, Azure or GCP?If you have no reason to choose otherwise, start with AWS: it has the largest market share and the most learning material. Choose Azure if the employers you want run on Microsoft, and GCP if you are heading into data and ML work at companies that use it. The concepts transfer, so the first cloud matters less than learning it properly.
- How do I practise on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud without getting a surprise bill?Use the free offer that fits you, set a budget alert before you create anything, tag every resource, build and destroy your labs with code, and run a five-minute check for the usual culprits, such as NAT gateways, load balancers, databases and public IPs, before you close your laptop.
- Are certifications like AWS or Google Cloud worth it for getting a tech job?It depends on the role. For cloud, DevOps, security and some data roles, a respected certification can help you get shortlisted, especially combined with a real project. For general software engineering roles, projects and skills matter far more. Do the certification to structure your learning, not as a replacement for building.
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