FOCUS 1.0: FinOps Foundation publishes the common cloud billing format

2024-06-20 · Publisher : FinOps Foundation · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

The FinOps Foundation declares FOCUS 1.0 generally available: an open specification normalizing cloud billing data, already supported by AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.

### Background On 20 June 2024, at FinOps X in San Diego, the FinOps Foundation announces general availability of **FOCUS 1.0** (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification). The project began 14 months earlier in a foundation working group, then was hosted as a Joint Development Foundation specification project within the Linux Foundation. FOCUS defines a common format for billing data from cloud infrastructure providers, to remove the normalization work on the customer side. ### Key facts - Providers involved: AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle contribute to the specification and support it. - Content: common columns, terminology and metrics for IaaS billing. - Use cases: cost analysis, allocation, commitment optimization, invoice reconciliation, unit costs. - Governance: a steering committee with three major providers and practitioners, with an intellectual property review. - Announced next step: a 1.1 release planned for November 2024 and further releases in 2025. ### Why it matters Until now, comparing AWS, Azure and Google Cloud bills required home-made scripts, costly to maintain. FOCUS lets FinOps tools and steering teams read multi-cloud bills with the same schema. For a services firm running several clouds at a client, it is the basis of unified reporting and more reliable chargeback. ### Takeaway Cloud bills now share a common format, the foundation of multi-cloud FinOps.

Tags : FinOps, Multi-cloud, Cloud, AWS, Azure