Dive Brief:
- The FinOps Foundation unveiled version 1.0 of its FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, known as FOCUS, Thursday. Now in the preview phase, the specification builds on preliminary FOCUS 0.5 standards released in May.
- AWS, until recently the lone holdout among the largest cloud providers, joined Microsoft, Google Cloud and Oracle on the project’s steering committee last month, securing broad hyperscaler support for FOCUS.
- “We are paving the way for FOCUS to foster collaboration among major cloud providers, FinOps vendors, leading SaaS providers and forward-thinking FinOps enterprises to establish a unified, serviceable framework for cloud billing data,” Mike Fuller, CTO at the FinOps Foundation, said in a Thursday announcement.
Dive Insight:
The FinOps Foundation has broadened the scope of its open-source specifications, in addition to expanding its membership.
Initially restricted to monitoring infrastructure costs, FOCUS now integrates SaaS data sets, data converter solutions and use cases for discount, unit pricing and rate transparency analysis, the announcement said.
The specifications also provide a library of more than 40 FOCUS use cases based on the experiences of some of the organization’s enterprise members, which include Capital One, Goldman Sachs and Walmart.
Organizations eager to adopt cloud have had a bumpy journey, as usage-based pricing, committed spend discounts and a decentralized IT ecosystem have made controlling cost a major pain point.
More than two-thirds of companies struggled with cost visibility across cloud, SaaS and on-prem assets, based on a summer survey of 506 IT professionals by software vendor Flexera.
FinOps practices have emerged as a process for tracking cloud spend, identifying overruns and rationalizing usage. The FOCUS specifications aim to normalize cost and usage data and standardize terminology and practices, the foundation said.
Forrester expects the effort to succeed in the coming year. The analyst firm predicted widespread adoption of FOCUS in a report earlier this month, noting, “enterprises are tired of navigating through thousand-page cloud bills trying to decipher the cost per team, engineer or capability.”
