Tauseef FayyazA to Z
Glossary
Every concept in this sheet, plus the smaller terms it uses. Select a concept to open its card.
A
- Actual versus amortised cost
- Actual cost shows charges when they are billed, so an upfront commitment appears as one big charge.
B
- Billing data latency
- Cost data arrives in batches, hours behind usage, and a month keeps changing for a few days after it ends.
- Billing export to BigQuery
- Automatic export of billing data to BigQuery: standard usage cost, detailed (resource-level) usage cost, pricing data and a FOCUS dataset in preview as of October 2026.
- Billing queries in SQL
- SQL over a billing export answers what the console cannot: cost by tag and service, top resources, week-on-week change.
C
- Cloud Billing accounts and projects
- Resources live in projects; each project is linked to one Cloud Billing account that pays for it.
- Cloud Billing reports
- Console 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.
- Cost tools on each provider
- The same FinOps job has a different tool name on each cloud.
H
- Hidden cost lines
- Charges compute-only estimates miss: data transfer, NAT gateways, load balancers, public IPv4 addresses, logs, snapshots, idle managed databases, marketplace software and the support plan.
L
- Labels in Google Cloud billing
- Key-value labels on projects and resources appear in billing reports and the BigQuery export.
- List, contracted, billed and effective cost
- List is the public price.
P
- Pricing calculators
- Free tools from each provider to estimate a design: every resource, size, hours, storage, requests and data transfer, with assumptions written down.
- Pricing units
- Every 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 data transfer, tokens for AI models.
T
- Tagging policy
- A 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 untagged resources.
- Tagging policy template
- A starting template with five required keys, their allowed values, and how the policy is applied and measured.
- Tags and labels for cost
- Key-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.
U
- Untaggable and shared spend
- Cost that cannot carry your tags: support, taxes, some data transfer, marketplace charges, centrally bought commitments and shared platforms.