The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS™) is an open-source specification that defines clear requirements for cloud vendors to produce consistent cost and usage datasets.
Supported by the FinOps Foundation, FOCUS™ aims to reduce complexity for FinOps Practitioners so they can drive data-driven decision-making and maximize the business value of cloud, while making their data skills more transferable across clouds, tools, and organizations.
What problem does FOCUS solve?
FinOps Practitioners face a daunting challenge: collecting, normalizing, and analyzing disparate cloud billing data to deliver insightful reports and recommendations that drive more business value from cloud investments.
Billing data from cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors, and other Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) streams into organizations every day, but each vendor employs unique terminology, taxonomy, and metrics in their billing file. This complexity slows a FinOps Practitioner down, as they must spend valuable time ingesting and normalizing all of this data before they can even begin analysis.
To make matters worse, each time a new vendor is added to the cloud ecosystem, a new schema must be developed to transform that cost and usage data into the organization’s proprietary format. This complexity compromises a Practitioner’s ability to deliver valuable insights.
FOCUS reduces the amount of work needed to begin FinOps analysis, enabling businesses to refocus that energy on activities that are more strategic and worthwhile.
FOCUS aligns cloud billing data from numerous sources into a single format that Practitioners, tool vendors, and service providers use to achieve FinOps Domains.
Built for the FinOps Community
FinOps Practitioners
With unified billing data, you spend more time on FinOps and less time on data normalization, and can refocus efforts on iteratively improving high-priority FinOps Capabilities. With FOCUS™, Practitioners also gain transferrable data skills.
Cloud Vendors
FOCUS™ helps Cloud Service Providers, SaaS Vendors, and other Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who generate cloud billing data by easing adoption of their offerings and accelerating usage of cloud infrastructure and software.
FinOps Tooling Providers
With FOCUS™, FinOps vendors do not need to spend development resources building data normalization functionality. Instead, those resources can be spent developing support for other FinOps Capabilities with higher impact.
How do I get started using FOCUS data?
The largest cloud service providers – Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Amazon Web Services (AWS) – all offer FOCUS-formatted cost and usage billing data exports directly from their native consoles.
See instructions to obtain your FOCUS data from each cloud service provider:
FinOps tool vendors and other cloud software vendors are also adopting the FOCUS data format. To help practitioners understand this landscape, the FinOps Foundation tracks FOCUS adopters on the FinOps Landscape, and will eventually offer an official certification signifying platform conformance with the Specification.
Benefits of FOCUS for the FinOps Practitioner
With FOCUS, FinOps Practitioners themselves gain the ability to transfer their data skills to perform FinOps capabilities regardless of the platform or vendors used. Now, they can learn a single process to run queries on cloud billing data, no matter the origin. This means their skills are more portable across clouds, FinOps tools, and organizations.
FOCUS™ also makes it easier for FinOps Practitioners to perform FinOps Capabilities and improves how they report the value of cloud back to the business. Reducing the time and effort needed to normalize and analyze cloud billing data enables Practitioners to refocus that energy on more important Capabilities. In other words, with FOCUS, Practitioners can spend more time on FinOps, and less time on data normalization.
Critically, FOCUS also enables an increase in self-service reporting across the organization. Practitioners can learn — and teach all stakeholders — a single process to query data and get answers to FinOps questions. This is especially important as organizations scale up
Improved reporting consistency and accuracy
Standardizing billing files in a consistent format reduces the chances of inaccurate reporting due to discrepancies in terminology and definitions of columns across external vendors or across internal groups
Opportunity for training and education
With FOCUS, practitioners can learn a single process to perform a FinOps activity. Training on cloud billing data is possible in this environment, and pays off for both the practitioner and their organization in terms of job mobility and business continuity.
Job mobility – Practitioners can transition between companies without having to learn a new normalization scheme.
Business continuity – New hires that join as FinOps Practitioners are already familiar with FOCUS, so organizations do not have to train them on normalizing billing data.
More self-service reporting
FOCUS makes it easier for more people in the business to self-serve reporting, which is critical for FinOps teams to scale. FinOps teams can teach Core and Allied Personas a single process to create their own reports on any FOCUS dataset so they can get answers to their own questions.
Reduced complexity of billing files
A single set of columns applies across all of an organization’s cloud billing data, even in a multi-vendor environment. This means FinOps Practitioners have a lot less terminology to learn.
Cheaper to process data
FOCUS combines actual billed costs and amortized costs into one dataset, drastically reducing the cost of compute and storage needed to process this data.
Multi-cloud data-driven decision making
FOCUS enables consistent reporting across vendors, enabling Leadership to analyze the whole environment instead of looking at each cloud or vendor in a silo. With better data, better decisions can be made, and goals can be met faster.
Increased innovation
With better understanding of cloud value, the path is cleared for using cloud offerings to drive innovation and business growth. FOCUS accelerates your path to FinOps excellence, ultimately helping to leverage cloud as a strategic asset for innovation.
The FOCUS Specification
FOCUS 1.0 defines 43 columns that can be used in cloud billing files. Each column has a unique name, ID, description, and the requirements for that column. Each column provides either qualitative data (Dimensions) or quantitative data (Metrics).
Metrics are commonly used for aggregations (sum, multiplication, averaging etc.) and statistical operations within the dataset.
Example Metric (Quantitative) Column: Billed Cost
Display Name: Billed Cost
Column ID: BilledCost
Description: A charge serving as the basis for invoicing, inclusive of all reduced rates and discounts while excluding the amortization of upfront charges (one-time or recurring).
Dimensions are commonly used to categorize, filter, and reveal details in your data when combined with metrics.
Example Dimension (Qualitative) Column: Availability Zone
Display Name: Availability Zone
Column ID: AvailabilityZone
Description: A provider-assigned identifier for a physically separated and isolated area within a Region that provides high availability and fault tolerance.
