So the period is a CloudWatch API attribute -> http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSRubySDK/latest/AWS/CloudWatch/Client.html#get_metric_statistics-instance_method -- I wouldn't want to rename to cloudwatch_delay since that's not what it actually is. 

The api says `The granularity, in seconds, of the returned datapoints`. So I could call it `period_in_sec` if that helps? I think the confusion is more around CloudWatch's api.