Today, users' taught me, passively, by using it, about Shelving an instance.
Suspending an instance puts it to sleep (via CPU suspension states) but the instance (virtual machines) is still using all of the memory and disk and cpu resources it was before (though the actual host CPU usage in this case is very very minimal.) Subtly different yet similar seems to be Pausing an instance. (I've never used this myself but am now checking to see if my users are using this.)
Stopping an instance still has the instance assigned to a hypervisor (essentially a compute host) and still "sort of" consumes resources on that host, most notably the ephemeral disk.
Shelving an instance makes a glance image snapshot of the instance and then removes all reference from the original hypervisor and compute host. It is consuming glance snapshot space in so doing but nothing on the hypervisor or compute host. So it is using the most minimal amount of resources possible.
