The FinOps Foundation, part of The Linux Foundation's non-profit technology consortium, which aims to advance the people and practice of cloud financial management, today announced the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS), a technical project to build and maintain an open specification for the presentation of cloud cost, usage, and billing data. Google and Microsoft are founding members and will be on the FOCUS steering committee.
Businesses increasingly need a single view of spend associated with delivering applications and services in the cloud. FOCUS outlines a consistent structure for the presentation of cloud cost data, which will enable companies to expedite cloud adoption. The consistent presentation increases trust in the data and the ability to map costs back to their business.
By making billing data easier to understand and more consistently reportable between multiple vendors, FOCUS will remove complexity and overhead from processes such as allocation, chargeback, budgeting, forecasting, and the other FinOps capabilities to maximize business value in the cloud. The specification initially targets spending from Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers and will expand to SaaS, PaaS, and on-premise costs to allow unified cost reporting across more types of spending.