Glossary

Single-Tenancy Environment

What is a single-tenancy environment in cloud computing?


A single-tenancy environment, also known as dedicated hosting or a dedicated instance, refers to a situation where each user or tenant has their own dedicated infrastructure and resources, including servers, storage and network components. These resources aren’t shared with any other users, maximizing performance and control.

What is a single-tenancy environment in cloud computing?


A single-tenancy environment, also known as dedicated hosting or a dedicated instance, refers to a situation where each user or tenant has their own dedicated infrastructure and resources, including servers, storage and network components. These resources aren’t shared with any other users, maximizing performance and control.

Related Definitions

Tail Spend

What is tail spend?


Tail spend refers to the unmanaged purchases made within an organization that fail to pass through an official procurement process. On account of their low value, the costs incurred by these purchases are seldom monitored by financing teams as they are generally too small to be deemed “strategic”. The problem, however, is that they can make up as much as 20% of a business’ total spend.

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Reserved Instances

What are reserved instances?


Reserved Instances (RIs) are a pricing and capacity reservation offering provided by AWS for their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and RDS (Relational Database Service) services.


They specifically allow users to commit to using a specific instance type in the same region for either a one or three-year term, in exchange for discounts of up to 72% – the exact discount is ultimately dependent on the commitment term, instance type, availability zone and region.


There are various types of Reserved Instances available, each with different terms and levels of flexibility. Standard Reserved Instances provide the highest cost savings but are the least flexible, whereas Convertible Reserved Instances offer more flexibility by allowing you to change instance families within the same instance type.


In contrast, Scheduled Reserved Instances offer a lower discount, but allow you to reserve capacity for specific time windows, such as business hours or weekends, providing cost savings for predictable workloads.

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Cloud Unit Economics

What is cloud unit economics?


By definition, cloud unit economics refers to the financial analysis and evaluation of both the costs and revenue associated with operating a cloud-based business.


In other words, it’s a way of looking at how much it costs to run your business on the cloud, as well as how much it brings in.

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Reduction Clause

What is a reduction clause?


A reduction clause refers to a provision in a software agreement that allows customers to reduce the number of licenses or users covered by their subscription during the term of an agreement. This provides customers with flexibility to adjust their plan to meet evolving business needs, while avoiding paying for licenses or users they no longer require or needing to terminate the contract. The specific terms and requirements of a reduction clause may vary depending on the SaaS provider and the subscription agreement, for example it may be subject to a minimum number of licenses or users.

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Auto-Scaling

What is auto-scaling?


Auto-scaling refers to the automatic adjustment of cloud computing resources based on an organization’s current demand and workload. It dynamically adjusts the allocation of resources to match the evolving requirements of an application or system without the need for manual intervention.


There are a number of benefits to using auto-scaling, the first being cost efficiency. By ensuring that resources are scaled up or down as and when needed, organizations can avoid over-provisioning and subsequently reduce unnecessary expenses. It also helps maintain consistent performance levels by automatically adding resources during peak demand periods.

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Cloud Cost Optimization

What is Cloud Cost Optimization?


Cloud cost optimization refers to the process of reducing and optimizing cloud spending, while ensuring optimal resource utilization and maintaining desired performance levels. It ultimately involves managing cloud costs without compromising business objectives or user experience.

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