Variable cost
The cloud is variable cost. That is its defining property compared to on-prem. The FinOps practice should exploit elasticity: scale down at night, terminate when idle, use spot for stateless work, commit only on the proven floor. Treating cloud as fixed-cost (provision once, run forever) is the most common single behavioral mistake.
1 lesson reference ← Back to glossary
Where it appears
Read the term in context.
Each row is a lesson that uses this term. The lesson where it first appears is the canonical definition.