Glossary

Cloud governance
and FinOps terms

The words used across this site, in plain language, each with the page that goes further.

Cloud account
The unit a cloud bills and isolates: an AWS account, an Azure resource group or a Google Cloud project. In RosettaHub each one belongs to a person or a project, which is how cost is attributed without relying on tags. More →
Landing zone
The multi-account structure a cloud estate sits on: the organisation, its accounts, and the security, logging and billing in place before anyone runs a workload. More →
Account vending
Handing out ready-made cloud accounts on request, already inside the landing zone, with their permissions and budget attached. RosettaHub creates accounts or assigns them from a ready pool. More →
Role (RosettaHub)
RosettaHub’s own unit of access, given to a person, project or group and inherited down the organisation. Roles are translated into each cloud’s native permissions, so nobody writes cloud policies by hand. More →
Service control policy (SCP)
An AWS Organizations policy that sets the maximum permissions in a member account, binding every user and role in it, the root user included. It does not apply to the management account. More →
Cloud key
The credential RosettaHub launches with. It ties a cloud account, region and network to the instance types allowed and the number of machines that may run at once. More →
Hard spending limit
A budget that stops spending when it is reached, rather than only sending an alert. In RosettaHub, what happens at the limit is set per account, from alert-only to a hard stop. More →
Spend cap (Google Cloud)
A Google Cloud budget that pauses new usage of one eligible service in one project when the target is exceeded. Compute and storage that are already running keep billing. More →
Showback and chargeback
Showback reports what each team spent; chargeback bills it back to their budget. Both depend on attributing every cost line to its owner. More →
FOCUS
The FinOps Foundation’s open specification for billing data, so cost from different clouds reads the same columns with the same meanings. More →
Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
AWS’s detailed billing data, delivered to an S3 bucket in your account. RosettaHub reads it, enriches every line with organisation, project and user, and writes it back in FOCUS and in AWS’s own format. More →
Idle and orphaned resources
Idle resources are running but doing nothing useful, such as a machine with no load. Orphaned resources are left behind by something that no longer exists, such as a disk nobody reattached. More →
Spot capacity
Spare cloud capacity at a fraction of the on-demand price, which the provider can reclaim at short notice: two minutes on AWS, about thirty seconds on Azure and Google Cloud. More →
Sandbox account
A cloud account where a person can experiment freely within limits on services, regions and budget, and which is cleaned and recycled when they are done. More →
MCP server
A Model Context Protocol server lets an AI assistant or agent, such as Claude Code, call a platform’s operations directly. RosettaHub’s exposes the same operations as its API and console. More →
Research and Engineering Studio (RES)
AWS’s open-source portal for research desktops and HPC. Its final release came out on 29 September 2026 and AWS support ends on 30 September 2027. More →