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FinOps Glossary

Short, direct definitions of the terms that come up in everyday FinOps work.

FinOps: The practice that brings engineering, finance and the business together to make cloud, SaaS and AI cost decisions with data, instead of guesswork.
FOCUS: FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification — the FinOps Foundation's open standard for normalizing cost data across cloud providers.
Showback: The practice of showing each team or project how much cloud resource it's consuming, without necessarily charging internally for it.
Rightsizing: Adjusting the size of a cloud resource (CPU, memory, instance type) to what the workload actually needs.
Idle resource: A provisioned, billed resource that isn't being effectively used — for example, a stopped VM or a load balancer with no traffic.
Shift-left FinOps: Bringing the financial decision to the start of a resource's creation cycle — estimating cost before approval, instead of discovering the spend on the invoice.
EOL (End of Life): The date a vendor stops providing support or security updates for a version of software or a service.
Extended support: A paid period, beyond standard support, in which a vendor keeps maintaining a version already considered EOL.
Unit economics: Analysis of cost and margin per unit of business — per customer, per transaction or per request, instead of just looking at total cost.