Skip to content

Glossary

This Glossary/Terminology section was created to support the understanding of terms and concepts used on the platform. Our goal is to provide clear and concise definitions that facilitate the understanding of functionalities and operations, ensuring that users have a general understanding of the information.

This section is organized alphabetically from A to Z.

Adjustments

They are credit or debit adjustments made to the invoice. They may occur due to billing errors, charge disputes, or changes in contract terms.

Cost center

A cost center is an organizational unit within the company that monitors and aggregates expenses related to specific activities, workspaces, or departments. It serves as a financial control tool, essential for efficient resource allocation. Cost centers are used to filter and analyze resource consumption. They help identify budget overruns and areas requiring financial adjustments.

Important

We do not create cost centers in your organization; we only reflect the cost centers created in your organization within the platform as a way to subdivide resource consumption according to the budget.

No Cost Center (cost center name)

To simplify the search, we use the term "No Cost Center" to identify all Workspaces not associated with any specific cost center.

Credits

Pre-established amounts from a provider contract that can be used to offset usage costs.

Forecast

An estimate of future costs based on current and historical spending. The forecast aims to provide an early view of projected costs, allowing finance and operations teams to identify consumption trends and adjust their resources or budgets as needed.

How it's calculated

  • Past months:
    There is no forecast for past months.

  • Current month: The forecast is calculated based on the average daily cost to date, this way the average cost is projected for the rest of the month. Before calculating the forecast for the current month, we consider a minimum date (2 or 3 days after the start of the month, depending on whether the month started on a weekend). This condition prevents the forecast from being calculated too early, ensuring that we have enough cost data for a more accurate estimate. We multiply the average daily cost by the total number of days in the month to obtain an estimate of the total cost until the end of the month. We add planned cost adjustments to the final value for greater accuracy.

  • Future months: For future months the forecasted value is equal to the one defined for that month's budget.

Recommendations

Recommendations are automatic optimization suggestions that help improve efficiency and reduce costs. We currently aggregate the following recommendation types:

Idle

  • Refers to resources that are inactive or underutilized. These resources generate costs but they have little to no workload on them.
  • Examples: A VM that is provisioned but not performing any tasks, or a database the does not process any queries frequently.

Underutilized

  • Refere-se a recursos que estão em uso mas com capacidade muito acima do necessário para a carga de trabalho atual. Esses recursos podem ser redimensionados para uma configuração mais econômica sem impactar o desempenho.
  • Exemplo: uma instância de máquina virtual configurada com alta capacidade de CPU e memória mas que utiliza apenas uma pequena fração destes recursos.

Reserved

  • Refers to a purchase or allocation of resources made in advance for a specific period of time, in exchange for a significant discount on the cost
  • Example: A virtual machine instance with stable and predictable workloads, where resource consumption follows a pattern, allowing you to optimize costs with discounts.

Others

  • Other types not listed above.

Region

Regions are specific geographic areas where the cloud provider’s data centers are located and where resources can be allocated. For more details about regions, refer to the provider’s documentation: GCP, AWS, Azure, and OCI

Resource

A resource is an allocated component of cloud infrastructure or service, such as a virtual machine, a database, or a serverless function, which generates costs according to its level of usage.
Learn more: GCP, AWS, Azure, and OCI

Role assignment

The attribution of roles is carried out during the process of invitating new users to the platform, determining the functionalities and permissions they will have access to.

  • Basic category
    • Viewer → Read-only access throughout the platform with no permission to modify resources or data.
    • Editor → Permission to manage cost centers: can create, add, and delete cost centers. Cannot edit company, organization, invites, users, or permission settings.
    • Owner → Perpermission to edit all resources without restrictions. Examples:
      • Invite new user: Can add new users to their company on the platform and assign permissions.
      • Manage permissions: Can change permissions of all users in their company.
      • Manage company: Can update company data.

Service

In cloud providers, a service is a functionality offered to meet specific needs, such as computing, storage, or analytics, accessible in a scalable way and upon demand. Designed to abstract infrastructure complexity, services allow users to focus on objectives rather than managing hardware/software. Services can be classified in various categories, the major ones being:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Provides virtualized hardware resources such as servers, storage, and networking (AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine).

  • Platform as a Service (PaaS): Provides a complete environment for application development and deployment (AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine).

  • Software as a Service (SaaS): Delivers ready-to-use, web-accessible applications (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365).

Note

These are some of the best-known categories, but there are others, such as FaaS (Function as a Service), DaaS (Desktop as a Service) and CaaS (Containers as a Service), which meet more specific needs.

Usage Category

  • SKU (GCP) → Acronym for Stock Keeping Unit. In the context of cloud providers it refers to a unique code that identifiies a product or part of a service that is being offered by the provider.
  • Usage Category → A usage category refers to different types of service consumption on AWS, such as On-Demand, Reserved, or Spot Instances, allowing for a detailed analysis of the associated costs.
  • Usage Category → A usage category is a classification that groups together the different types of services and resources consumed, such as computing, storage and networking, facilitating the management and analysis of costs on the platform.
  • SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) or Part Number → Refers to the categorization of infrastructure components (such as instances, volumes, or buckets) used to apply access policies and organize cost measurement. Each resource type has a specific name used in usage and billing reports.

Support

An additional fee charged for support and technical assistance services, which vary according to the support level contracted. It covers from technical support to consulting services. To understand which services are offered and how they are billed, see the provider's documentation: GCP, AWS, Azure and OCI.

Usage commitments

Usage commitment → Usage commitments allow users to receive discounts by committing to the use of specific resources for defined periods. Each provider establishes its own rules and conditions for these commitments, so our role is to mirror this value according to the rules provided by the provider itself.

  • GCP - Committed Use Discounts (CUD):

    • Automatic Discount: Automatically applied to the continuous use of specific compute resources.
    • No Specific Management Required: Discount applied to overall resource consumption.
    • Configuration Flexibility: Choice of different machine types and combinations of CPUs and memory.

  • AWS - Reserved Instances (RI):

    • Cost Discounts: Substantial discounts compared to on-demand pricing.
    • Reserved Capacity: Guaranteed capacity availability in some regions and instance types.
    • Flexibility: Options to sell unused instances in the AWS Reserved Instance Marketplace.

  • Azure - Reserved Virtual Machine Instances (VM Reservations):

    • Substantial Discounts: Discounts for one- or three-year commitments on virtual machines.
    • Flexible Model: Reservations can be applied to multiple virtual machines, allowing flexibility in discount allocation.

  • OCI - Annual Universal Credits (Commitment):

    • Flexibility: Unlike fixed instance reservations, credits can be used for any OCI service (Compute, Storage, Database, etc.) in any region.
    • Volume Discount: The discount is applied directly to the value of the credits purchased; the higher the annual financial commitment, the lower the unit cost of services.
    • "Use It or Lose It" Model: Credits are purchased for use within a 12-month period.
    • OCI Rewards: Customers using OCI services can accumulate credits to reduce or offset Oracle On-Premise license support invoices.

Workspace

  • Project → A container that organizes related resources/services and manages billing and permissions.
  • Account → The level at which resources are provisioned, including multiple VPCs, projects, and services.
  • Subscription → A billing account where resources are provisioned, policies and permissions are also managed through it.
  • Compartment → A compartment in OCI is a container used to organize and isolate resources, enabling access control and the application of security policies.