As businesses move to the cloud, understanding how and where they spend their money is becoming increasingly difficult. Different SaaS providers and cloud platforms use their own definitions for how they report what these companies spend. Furthermore, they then make this data available in different formats. All of this has led to FinOps, a new practice that aims to bring more accountability to cloud spending.
The FinOps Foundation today announced the first preview of its seminal work: the Open FinOps cost and usage specifications (CONCENTRATE). The companies involved here include companies you’d normally think of as competitors, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle Cloud, IBM, Meta, VMware, and big cloud users like Walmart and Capital One, as well as service providers like Atlassian, Twilio, Datadog and Snowflake. The fact that these companies are working together to create this specification shows how pervasive this problem is.
“We see FOCUS as the cornerstone of the FinOps lexicon by providing an open source, vendor-agnostic specification that has a unified schema and language,” said Mike Fuller CTO at the FinOps Foundation. “With this release, we are paving the way for FOCUS to strengthen collaboration between major cloud providers, FinOps vendors, leading SaaS providers and long-term FinOps businesses to create a single, serviceable framework for cloud billing data, increasing data trust and making it easier to understand the value of cloud spending.”
The idea behind FOCUS is to create a basic framework that normalizes cost and usage data between SaaS and cloud providers. The specification itself (PDF) includes definitions for commonly used terms and the type of metrics providers should attach to them.
Before the specification reaches the 1.0 release, project members expect to be able to take the specification and offer a library of real-world use cases curated by FinOps professionals from Capital One, among others.
“The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specifications (FOCUS) — an initiative led by the FinOps Foundation — is the result of many efforts by organizations frustrated by huge and complex accounts,” said Forrester analyst Lee Sustar. famous earlier this year. “Given its support from cloud users such as major banks and retailers, FOCUS is gathering momentum.”
