The FinOps Foundation today announced FOCUS, an open-source initiative designed to help companies more easily track their cloud costs.

The goal of the initiative is to develop a standard specification for organizing cloud spending and usage data. In the future, FOCUS will also provide a number of related data management capabilities. Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC, two of the largest players in the cloud market, will join the steering committee tasked with managing the project.

“FOCUS will solve problems that organizations maturing their cloud adoption now face,” said Udam Dewaraja, the chair of the FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS working group. “Today, there’s no clear way to unify cost and usage data sets across different vendors.”

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’ 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.

The initial release of FOCUS is set to roll out in June. It will focus primarily on organizing data that describes a company’s infrastructure-as-a-service costs and usage. Future releases will add support for data from software-as-a-service products, platform-as-a-service tools and other technologies.

The FinOps Foundation also plans to extend FOCUS’ feature set in other ways. It intends to create a system that will allow users to organize financial data from multiple services in a centralized repository for simpler processing. Additionally, the group will add scorecards for tracking the extent to which cloud platforms and other products support the FOCUS specification.

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