Glossary
Plain definitions of the terms used across the CloudIQ documentation, from audit to verified.
These are the terms the CloudIQ pages use, in plain words.
CloudIQ terms#
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Audit | The daily run of every check across your connected accounts. Each audit shows what changed since the last one |
| Check | One automated test for one named condition in one service, such as "unattached EBS volume" |
| Finding | What a check reports: the resource, the evidence, the estimated saving, the risk and the proposed fix |
| Task | A finding someone has approved and is working on |
| Savings ledger | The record of every finding through five stages: identified, assigned, in progress, completed, verified |
| Verified | The last ledger stage. A later audit no longer finds the condition, and billing data confirms the effect where available |
| Solution | One of CloudIQ's four areas: Cloud Cost, Rate, Data Cloud and Workload Optimization |
| Module | A group of checks for one service, such as EC2 or BigQuery. Access permissions follow the modules you turn on |
| Runbook | Step-by-step instructions for a change, with rollback steps |
| Fini | The CloudIQ AI cost analyst, available on every page |
| Tenant | Your organization's CloudIQ workspace. Its data is isolated from every other tenant |
| Design debt | Cost that comes from a design that no longer fits, such as the wrong storage class or pricing model, rather than from idle resources |
Access and security terms#
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Read-only role | The AWS IAM role, or Google Cloud grant, that lets CloudIQ read your accounts. It cannot change anything |
| Agent | Software installed on your servers. CloudIQ installs none |
| Data plane | The contents of your data: S3 objects, database rows, log contents. CloudIQ cannot read them |
| Web identity federation | How the AWS role trusts CloudIQ: short-lived tokens instead of stored keys |
| OIDC | OpenID Connect, the standard used for single sign-on with your identity provider |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets AI assistants such as Claude query outside tools |
Cloud pricing terms#
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Rightsizing | Moving a resource to a smaller or cheaper size that still fits its peak usage |
| Savings Plans | An AWS discount for committing to a fixed hourly spend for one or three years |
| Reserved Instances (RIs) | An AWS discount for committing to a specific instance type for one or three years |
| CUDs | Committed use discounts, Google Cloud's discount for a one- or three-year commitment |
| SUDs | Sustained use discounts, which Google Cloud applies automatically to steady usage |
| Spot | Spare cloud capacity at a deep discount, which the provider can reclaim at short notice |
| Graviton and arm64 | AWS's own lower-cost processors |
| gp2 and gp3 | Two AWS EBS disk types. gp3 usually costs less for the same performance |
| IOPS | Disk input and output operations per second |
| Slot | A unit of BigQuery compute |
| On-demand and Editions | BigQuery's two pricing models: pay per byte scanned, or pay for reserved slot capacity |
| Showback and chargeback | Reporting cloud cost by team, and billing it back to them |
Next#
Try this against your own spend
A free savings analysis runs the checks described in these docs against your AWS or Google Cloud account and returns a ranked list of priced findings.