The Linux Foundation’s FinOps Foundation initiative today launched version 1.0 of its open-source billing standard, called the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification.

The hope is that the specification, FOCUS for short, will become the industry standard for cloud services providers, and make it easier for enterprises to manage, track and predict cloud spending. By creating a uniform standard for billing that’s used by every cloud infrastructure provider, FOCUS will help reduce complexity for FinOps practitioners.

The foundation said that all of the leading cloud computing companies, including Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Oracle Corp., have gotten onboard with the idea. Each of those companies helped contribute to the creation of the standard via the project’s steering committee.

Founded in 2020, the FinOps Foundation is a project that aims to codify and promote better cloud financial management, and to do that, it’s focused on developing best practices and standards for companies that consume cloud computing resources. Its ultimate aim is to help enterprises become better at cloud financial management.

FinOps is defined as a combination of finance and DevOps, stressing the communications and collaboration between business and engineering teams. According to the FinOps Foundation, companies that adopt the FinOps model will be able to squeeze more value out of their cloud computing investments.

FinOps has been a hot area given pressures to reduce cloud costs. Just today, for example, Vega Cloud announced updates to its Enterprise FinOps platform, in particular an AI chatbot called Cosmoo, at the FinOps Foundations FinOps X event in San Diego. Vega Cloud’s platform is aimed at helping information technology leaders optimize cloud spending across networks, applications and multicloud elements from a single point of access.

Creating a standardized billing format has long been one of the Foundation’s main priorities. It first outlined FOCUS in November, saying it was the result of more than a year’s collaboration by its member companies.

Cloud platforms generate financial data that describes how much infrastructure a customer has used, when and what that infrastructure costs. Companies can leverage that financial data for accounting tasks such as forecasting future spending. According to the FinOps Foundation, such accounting tasks are often difficult to carry out because of data formatting hurdles.

The challenge is that each cloud platform organizes the financial data it generates in a different format. Analyzing datasets stored in different formats can be a complicated task, particularly when there’s a large amount of information involved. The FinOps Foundation’s newly detailed FOCUS project aims to ease the process.

One of the challenges that FOCUS addresses is that cloud providers often use different nomenclatures in their financial datasets. For example, one provider might refer to compute expenses as “instance spending” while another may use the term “virtual machine costs.” Such terminology differences can lead to calculation errors in the financial software that a company uses to track its cloud expenses.

FOCUS introduces standardized terminology for describing cloud expenses and usage metrics. It also provides a standardized schema, or a data format in which financial information can be organized. A schema specifies technical details such as the maximum number of expenses that should be included in each database row.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said enterprises will welcome the availability of a new standard for cloud computing bills. He explained that these bills are notoriously complex and difficult to understand, and are often designed by cloud companies to be less than transparent.

“It’s good to see cloud companies moving away from that practice, and there are good reasons to hope that the FOCUS specification will help to simplify things so enterprises can better understand their cloud spending,” Mueller said. “But this is only version 1.0, so it may be some time yet before cloud billing complexity becomes a thing of the past.”

With the release of FOCUS 1.0 today, the FinOps Foundation says, the specification is finally ready for general adoption by cloud computing providers. In the coming months, it hopes to see improvements in data exports from billing generators such as the cloud platforms, private cloud operators and software-as-a-service providers.

Although the spec is now ready for prime time, the FinOps Foundation insisted that its work is far from done. It said its members are already working on the FOCUS 1.1 release, and planning for 1.2. Over time, the depth and quality of the specification will improve, and the Foundation will work to encourage smaller cloud services providers to adopt the same standard.

Mike Fuller, chief technology officer at the FinOps Foundation, said that by adopting FOCUS now, cloud computing providers will be able to make life much easier for their customers by “normalizing” cloud spend.

“We’ve moved beyond the initial building phase for FOCUS and into the phase where practitioners can use these datasets to perform multicloud discount analysis, optimize resource usage and allocate shared costs,” Fuller said. “FOCUS makes it easier for organizations to increase value from their cloud investments.”

Forrester Research Inc. analyst Tracy Woo said the release of FOCUS 1.0 is a big deal for the cloud computing industry, as it will prove critical in helping enterprises distinguish specific vendor environments from their cloud bills.

“FOCUS 1.0 is the first step in a long journey towards the abstractable, composable cloud, removing the burden of the multi-skill set knowledge required to manage costs across every cloud,” Woo said. “In doing so, organizations can more easily optimize their cloud investments and drive sustainable financial growth.”

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