Glossary
Key terms used throughout the frugally.app documentation.
Connection
A link between frugally.app and an AWS account, established by deploying an IAM role. Connections can be set up individually (Standalone) or discovered automatically through an AWS Organisation.
See Connecting Your AWS Accounts for setup instructions.
Target
A logical group of AWS resources to act on, defined by service type, regions, and tag filters. Targets are scoped to one or more Connections.
Execution
A single run of a Target's actions — stop, start, scale, or terminate. Executions can be triggered manually, by a Schedule, or as a dry run. Each Execution tracks per-resource results and a confidence score.
Schedule
A time-based trigger linked to one or more Targets. Schedules support one-time runs, named patterns (weekdays only, nightly, etc.), and custom CRON expressions.
Guard Project
A governance container for infrastructure change proposals. Each project has an intent (create, modify, optimise, or destroy), a list of affected resources, and a versioned approval workflow (Draft, Submitted, Approved/Rejected, Executed).
Part of the Guard pillar.
Budget
A spending limit tracked against actual AWS costs, set at the project or team level. Budgets support threshold alerts at configurable percentages (e.g. 50%, 80%, 100%).
Part of the Guard pillar.
Scope
A permission boundary that restricts what a user or Group can see and act on. Scopes come in three types — Environment, Connection, and Target — with the most specific match winning.
Group
A collection of team members used for shared access (via Scopes) and notification policies. Groups can be managed manually, synced from Slack user groups (Pro), or provisioned via SCIM (Enterprise).
Credit
The billing unit consumed by frugally.app actions. Each plan includes a monthly credit allocation; different actions consume different amounts depending on the AWS service and resource size.
See Billing.
Violation
A detected breach of a budget, policy, or compliance rule. Violations have a severity level (Low, Medium, High, Critical) and can be resolved manually or through auto-remediation.
Part of the Guard pillar.
Scan
A periodic compliance check run by Guard. Scans evaluate your AWS environment against configured rules and produce Findings.
Part of the Guard pillar.
Finding
A specific issue discovered during a Guard scan — for example, an untagged resource or an over-provisioned instance. Findings are linked to the scan that produced them.
Part of the Guard pillar.
Cost Posture
A snapshot score representing your team's overall cost health. The posture score factors in waste, coverage, and optimisation opportunities, and is tracked over time to show trends.
Part of the Guard pillar.
Maturity Assessment
A self-assessment of your team's FinOps practice maturity across dimensions such as visibility, optimisation, governance, and culture. Completing the assessment produces a score and an improvement path.
Part of the Guard pillar.
Drift
A mismatch between Infrastructure-as-Code definitions (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.) and the live state of AWS resources. Drift is detected by the GitHub integration and reported as alerts with severity levels.