The FinOps Foundation today introduced the first round-number release of FOCUS, an open-source standard designed to help companies more easily track their cloud costs and forecast future spending.

The FinOps Foundation is an industry consortium that was launched by the Linux Foundation three years ago. The group introduced FOCUS, or the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, this past May. The round-number release it debuted today, FOCUS version1.0-preview, is a major technical milestone that signals the technology is now closer to production-ready status.

The project is backed by many of the cloud market’s largest players. The list includes Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Oracle Corp. A number of major public cloud users such as Walmart Inc., Capital One Financial Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are also supporting the project.

Each cloud operator provides its customers with billing data that describes the cost of the services they use. Typically, this data also includes more granular details such as the price of the individual products a user has bought and any discounts that were applied to that pricing. Enterprises use the billing information they receive from cloud providers to track their spending, forecast future costs and craft budgets.

The amount of billing data that a large cloud environment generates can be significant. As a result, enterprise finance teams typically don’t review that data manually. They instead load it into analytics tools that can condense large amounts of information into graphs and forecasts.

The challenge the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS standard aims to address is that raw billing data often can’t be processed by analytics tools. It has to be reformatted before analysis may begin, which requires a significant amount of manual work. FOCUS is aimed at simplifying the process.

The reason the data preparation phase involves a major time investment is that different cloud providers organize their billing data in different ways. For example, one provider might label compute costs as “instance pricing” while another may use the phrase “virtual machine rates.” Such differences in terminology have to be reconciled to ensure a finance team’s analytics tool interprets the information accurately.

In many cases, cloud providers’ billing datasets are also structured differently. Formatting details such as the number of columns included in each dataset can vary significantly. That further complicates the task of inputting the information into analytics tools for processing.

FOCUS defines a set of common rules for how cloud billing information should be structured. Moreover, it establishes standardized data terminology. This removes the need for companies to reconcile formatting differences between their cloud services’ billing datasets manually before analyzing them.

“We are establishing FOCUS as the cornerstone lexicon of FinOps by providing an open-source, vendor-agnostic specification featuring a unified schema and language,” said FinOps Foundation Chief Technology Officer Mike Fuller. 

The new version of FOCUS that launched today introduces several improvements over the standard’s previous version, which debuted in September. It now lends itself to organizing billing data from not only public cloud platforms but also software-as-a-service applications. The FinOps Foundation has also added open-source components that can check the accuracy of incoming data before processing it.

Alongside the technical improvements, the new version introduces a library of example use cases. FOCUS users now have access to more than 40 guides that demonstrate how the standard can be applied to common financial tasks. 

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