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™ reduces complexity for FinOps Practitioners so they can drive data-driven decision-making and maximize the business value of cloud.
Learn about FOCUS and see how GitLab is using it to unify billing data across clouds and vendors.
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 normalizes cost and usage billing data from different sources, reducing the amount of work needed to begin FinOps analysis, and enabling businesses to refocus that energy on activities that are more strategic and worthwhile.
FOCUS unifies cloud billing data from numerous sources into a single format that Practitioners, tool vendors, and service providers use to achieve FinOps Domains.
Who Uses FOCUS?
There are two broad constituencies for FOCUS: cloud billing data generators and cloud billing data consumers.
Billing data generators
Generators of cloud billing data are cloud vendors that generate bills to send to customers who use their resources, tools, and/or services. For generators of cloud billing data, the Specification is the set of requirements for FOCUS billing datasets. It defines the data that must be present in the file and how the column names must be written.
Billing data generators include, but are not limited to:
- Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) a.k.a. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers
- Cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Providers
- Cloud Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)
Billing data consumers
Consumers of cloud billing data are end users who ingest cost and usage billing data from cloud vendors to perform FinOps activities. Billing data consumers can refer to the Specification for clarification about the definition of a Column of data. Consumers can also leverage a library of FinOps Use Cases containing predefined SQL queries that can be run on FOCUS datasets to answer FinOps questions.
Benefits for the FinOps Community
Benefits for Cloud Vendors
FOCUS™ helps Cloud Service Providers, SaaS vendors, and other Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who generate cloud billing data by easing adoption of your offerings and accelerating usage of cloud infrastructure and software.
When your billing file is in the FOCUS format, customers can readily integrate your billing data into their data pools and/or tooling and will already know the terminology and definitions used in your billing file. FOCUS™ also makes it easier for businesses to understand the ROI of (and choose a vendor that) best meets their needs. This clarity and confidence often increases adoption, accelerates account growth, and leads to “stickiness.” Thus, FOCUS eases adoption, and accelerates usage of cloud infrastructure and software, while reducing account churn.
Benefits for FinOps Tool Vendors
FinOps vendors are a subset of cloud vendors that are both generators and consumers of cloud billing data. They garner all the same benefits as other cloud vendors, with one additional benefit: more development resources. FOCUS removes the need to normalize billing data from different sources, so FinOps vendors do not need to waste development resources building data normalization functionality. Instead, those engineering resources can be spent developing support for other FinOps Capabilities with higher impact.
Benefits for FinOps Practitioners and their organizations
With FOCUS, FinOps Practitioners can learn a single process to run queries on cloud billing data, no matter the origin. This means Practitioners’ 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.
This translates into a number of benefits for their organization:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Easier integration of new vendors. When a new vendor is added to the cloud ecosystem, the organization already has a defined format to transform the data into. No time is spent figuring out what format to transform the data into.
- 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.
- 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.
- Business Continuity. With FOCUS, practitioners can learn a single process to perform a FinOps activity with less bespoke training. New hires that join as FinOps Practitioners are already familiar with FOCUS, so organizations do not have to train them on normalizing billing data.
- Tool Flexibility. FOCUS provides a single set of columns which are transferable across cloud and third party tool providers which make it easy for individuals to adjust to changing providers as organizations adjust their toolkits over time.
- Beyond Cloud. Over time, FOCUS is expected to include SaaS, PaaS, Licensing & Software, and on-premises costs in combination with public cloud spend. Further increasing in power of having a normalized, single source of truth data set from which to drive value based decisions.
- Common language with external peers. With FOCUS, organizations are able to discuss FinOps with other organizations which have adopted FOCUS using common terms with a common understanding irrespective of different cloud and tooling vendors each organization may be using.
Specification Releases
FOCUS 1.0, announced in June 2024, gave FinOps Practitioners the ability to merge billing data from multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) without applying proprietary normalization schemas. That milestone marked the first time that Practitioners could merge billing data from these sources without applying any proprietary normalization schemas.
The latest release – Version 1.1 – was ratified on November 7, 2024 . This version adds new Columns that deepen support for billing data generated by cloud service providers, giving FinOps Practitioners the ability to do more granular multi-cloud analysis on that multi-cloud data. This release also improves metadata to better support Extract Transform Load (ETL) processes, and includes normative changes for some existing FOCUS Columns.
The FOCUS Steering Committee and Maintainers are now engaging in roadmap development and release planning. Vendors and Practitioners can expect incremental releases over the next several years as the Specification is expanded to provide the data elements necessary to perform additional FinOps Capabilities and integrate additional types of IT spending.
