Glossary of AWS cost and governance terms

Reading a page

Verdict: The sentence at the top of a page saying whether the news is good or bad. It carries no figures; the figures sit beneath it, and both are computed in the same place, so they cannot disagree.
Baseline: What a figure is compared against, stated beside it: last month by this day, the window before, the budget. A figure with nothing to compare against says so.
Display currency: The currency amounts are shown in, chosen per reader. AWS bills in US dollars and that is what is stored; conversion uses the ECB daily reference rate, and the rate and its date are shown beside the choice.

Pace: This month's spend over its complete days against the same number of days into last month. It answers whether this month will land higher. Today's part-day is left out of both sides, so the clock cannot pass for a fall.
Run rate: What one day costs now, the mean of the last seven complete days, against what one day cost last month. It answers whether anything actually got more expensive, and a longer or shorter month cannot move it.
Month-end forecast: Where this month will land, projected from the rate its complete days have run at.
Cost window: The range you choose on Costs, from the last 7 days to 14 months. Spend by service and the biggest movers are read over it, against the window of the same length just before it.
Comparison: A second line on the Costs chart: the previous period, or the same period a year earlier. Off by default, and carried in the link when you share it.
Commitment coverage: The share of eligible spend billed at Savings Plans rates rather than on-demand, with the uncovered spend in money beside it. It answers whether another commitment is worth buying.
Commitment utilization: The share of what was already committed that was actually used. It answers whether the last commitment was the right size.
Commitment expiry: A Savings Plan or Reserved Instance term ending, with the monthly spend that returns to on-demand rates when it does. Listed soonest first; the soonest inside the warning window is marked imminent.

Required tag: A tag every taggable resource must carry, with a value, to count as accounted for. You declare them in Settings. Keys match case-sensitively, as AWS matches them.
Attribution tag: The one required tag that ownership of spend is measured against, such as a cost centre. It must be activated as a cost allocation tag in your management account before Cost Explorer can report on it.
Taggable resource type: A resource type that counts toward the compliance score: EC2 instances, S3 buckets, Lambda functions, RDS instances and DynamoDB tables. Each is a cost that can be tagged, so every miss is something you can fix.
Tagging compliance score: The share of taggable resources carrying every required tag. A resource with some of them but not all counts as non-compliant.
Untagged cost exposure: Spend that carries no attribution tag: the spend no owner can be charged for. Distinct from the score, since a resource missing a different tag can hurt the score while its spend is still attributable.

Billing channel: Who invoices for the tokens: AWS, for models used through Bedrock, or Anthropic directly, for Claude bought from Anthropic. The same model can be bought on both.
Direct AI spend: Claude bought from Anthropic rather than through AWS, read from Anthropic's own reporting with keys you set in Settings.
Token type: One of the four things a model meters: input, output, cache read and cache write. They are priced differently and shown apart, because an input-plus-output total does not match the bill.
Workspace: Anthropic's unit for grouping API usage, the nearest thing the direct channel has to a cost centre. The default workspace is named rather than dropped.
Spend budget: An optional monthly figure for direct Anthropic spend, set in Settings. Month to date, the budget's even pace and the month-end forecast are set against it. No budget set is shown as no budget, never as zero.
Limit crossing: The day this month's spend passes a budget limit: a past day if it already has, a projected one if it has not, and absent if the current rate will not reach it this month.

Management account: The account at the top of your AWS Organization, where billing lives. Cloud_CTRL holds one read-only role there and nothing else.
Workload account: The account in your organization that Cloud_CTRL is deployed into. Everything it runs and stores is there.
Resource backend: Where the resource inventory is read from: an organization-wide Resource Explorer view, or an AWS Config aggregator. Either must cover the whole organization, not only the management account.
AWS Health event: Something AWS reports as happening to your organization: a service degrading now, a scheduled change with a deadline, or a notice. Each carries how much action AWS says it needs and how many accounts it affects.