Vocabulary · Volume 1 and Volume 2

SKU

Stock-keeping unit, borrowed from retail inventory: one sellable configuration of a service in a provider's catalog, with its size, features, and price. The name encodes the configuration — Microsoft's `Standard_D4s_v5` is a general-purpose family, four vCPUs, premium-storage capable, fifth version — and is worth reading before pricing or reserving. Commitments, quotas, shortages, and supply reservations are SKU-specific, and the choice among SKUs is an engineering decision with a price attached.

The definition appears in the Volume 1 glossary and Volume 2 glossary. This page collects where the book uses the term and where the blog takes it up.