When it comes to FinOps, data is key to understanding costs and usage patterns, and fundamental to making smart decisions about cloud strategy and operations.
We are used to dealing with large amounts of billing data, and if you have multiple clouds, it gets even more complicated. How you collect, standardise and analyse this data is key to presenting the information in a consistent way and making the right recommendations.
Until now, there has been no concrete standard, but the FinOps Foundation has stepped up to the plate with an open source initiative: FOCUS, which aims to provide clear guidelines for cloud providers and vendors to generate FinOps-enabled datasets, regardless of the data’s origin. This removes some of the complexity from FinOps workflows and improves the flow of information.
Let's take a closer look at the specification.
What is FOCUS?
FOCUS: FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification (Linux Foundation open source project) is a technical specification and toolkit to create and maintain an open standard for cloud cost, usage and billing data across all major cloud service providers.
Its main objective is to make billing data more consistent and uniform, improve its understanding and allow everyone (CSPs, MSPs, SaaS and/or in-house tools) to speak the same language to make better decisions.
In short, it is about building confidence in the data and facilitating cost mapping.
Why is it important?
Basically for two reasons: the first is that it is a way to build confidence in the data and greater financial accountability because everyone is speaking the same language. And the second is that it makes it easier to design processes and queries, regardless of the origin of the data, because there will be a central location and a common format: terminology and data structures.
Who is FOCUS aimed at?
As we said, FOCUS is a technical specification and a set of tools, so whether your organisation is in a single cloud or a multi-cloud environment, using FOCUS has implications:
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For single cloud organisations: it reduces the efforts required to transform data so that it can be consumed in a consistent way by teams for FinOps analytics. The learning curve is reduced and collaboration between different teams is easier as they are all working from the same specification.
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For multi-cloud organisations: in multi-cloud environments, FOCUS makes much more sense as it allows us to combine invoices from multiple cloud providers. This means that queries can work seamlessly across an organisation’s cloud billing. In this way, we avoid having to process each provider’s cloud invoice and create separate reports for each provider.
Getting started with Focus
Through cloud providers. The main cloud providers are adapting their data to FOCUS and already provide tools, views, converters, etc. to do this directly.
- Google Cloud. It has a BigQuery view that transforms billing data to match the data attributes and metrics defined in the FOCUS v1.0 specification. (Preview) New BigQuery cloud billing view based on FOCUS | Google Cloud Blog.
- Microsoft. Sample Power BI reports from FOCUS available for you to connect to your own data or convert your data to FOCUS Convert to FOCUS - FinOps toolkit.
- Amazon. This was the last of the major cloud providers to join the FOCUS working group. We have not found any specific documentation along this line, but expect further developments in the near future.
- Others. There are many other players driving this initiative: IBM, Oracle, VMWare, Meta, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, Accenture and Walmart.
- FOCUS Converter. FOCUS Converter is a CLI for converting cloud provider billing data files to the FOCUS schema. Supported providers currently include: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. See here for more details and how to use it.
- We have provided the most interesting links to explore the specification further:
- Specification website focus.finops.org.
- Specification for Cloud Billing Data FOCUS Specification.
Also, if you want to get certified, here are the links to the certifications and courses:
The bottom line
FOCUS has a clear purpose: to remove the complexity and overhead of standardising and understanding taxonomies and billing data when you have one or more cloud providers and other SaaS tools.
FOCUS adoption is a reality, supported by the three major cloud providers (GCP, Azure and AWS) and the FinOps Foundation, as well as major global cloud consumers (Walmart, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Capital One, etc.).
Today (with FOCUS 1.0), the priority is to standardise cloud infrastructure billing, but in the future FOCUS will be extended to cover other billing such as SaaS solutions and licensing.
FinOps FOCUS will continue to evolve and the adoption of this standard will undoubtedly allow organisations to make a quantum leap in the practice of FinOps, optimising the way they manage and visualise costs and enabling all teams to perform common FinOps functions in a much more effective, standardised and portable way, regardless of the cloud.
References
Patricia Prieto
Telecommunications Engineer. I started my career working for Telcos with back-end development and a good overview of the whole OSI model. The challenges I have faced over the years have led me to take on many roles and learn new things every day. I believe that effort and commitment are the key to making things work.
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