How FinOps FOCUS improves cloud cost management (and now even more areas of your business)
The power and flexibility that the cloud provides has been game-changing for organizations both large and small. It has democratized access to IT resources that would normally have been out of reach for all but the largest organizations. Cloud offerings, which started with the core set of compute, networking, and storage have branched out into services encompassing virtually every corner of the IT landscape–databases, caching, queuing, orchestration, containers, AI and machine learning, just to name a few. And with this enhanced ability to access the vast array of services, comes the ability to accumulate a vast amount of cloud spend. A lot of cloud spend.
Each of the cloud provider services has their own pricing model, and the invoice data for these services takes many forms, none of which are standardized across different cloud providers, and sometimes not even across services within the same provider. This leads to lengthy and complex cloud bills. As an example, multiple Flexera customers generate cloud bills that contain several hundred million rows of billing data each month across multiple cloud providers, with different usage, cost, and identifier formats.
Enter cloud cost management.
What is FinOps FOCUS?
To address the complexity of cloud billing and to bring some order to the chaos, the FinOps Foundation has created FinOps FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification). This open-source specification has been embraced by the major cloud vendors (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, Oracle Cloud, and most recently, Tencent Cloud) and enables their customers to export their cloud billing data in the standardized FOCUS format.
As a technical specification, FOCUS formalizes a standard format for cloud bills, with the intent to simplify the complexities involved in data normalization. This enables FinOps practitioners, vendors, and the cloud providers themselves to streamline their FinOps practices, and significantly reduce the time and effort required to normalize and then ingest cloud billing data into their systems of record.
Credit: The FinOps Foundation
How FinOps FOCUS improves cloud cost management
The benefits of adopting the FOCUS format are numerous, and touch all members of the FinOps community:
Cloud providers benefit from the fact that FOCUS eases adoption of the cloud provider services by their customers. If a customer can more readily ingest and inspect their cloud usage data in a known and standardized format, they will have increased visibility into their usage. With that peace of mind, they are more apt to adopt additional services from that provider that follow that same known and understood billing format.
FinOps tool vendors (such as Flexera) benefit in that the significant effort involved in normalizing data from multiple disparate sources into a common format to be used within the vendor’s platform is now reduced with the use of FOCUS. These vendors can shift resources away from the behind-the-scenes plumbing work that is required to normalize and ingest cloud billing data, and instead focus (no pun intended!) those resources on their differentiating services and capabilities.
FinOps practitioners benefit from the use of FOCUS in that they can standardize their queries and their optimization processes, regardless of where the cloud billing data came from. The skills they have acquired are now portable across cloud vendors, many FinOps tools, and organizations. A FinOps FOCUS certification opens employment prospects across a wide spectrum of opportunities.
Calling all FinOps practitioners: Join the FinOps FOCUS community
FOCUS is very much a community-driven initiative and has benefited from the involvement of many like-minded individuals that were looking for a way to make FinOps easier and more attainable for the widest possible audience. Participation can be at the individual level and/or the organizational level. The FinOps Foundation offers a variety of certifications (of which FOCUS is a subset), which enable members of the FinOps community to learn different aspects of the FinOps discipline, and unlock access to additional training and reference materials.
For organizations that want to participate, the number of contributing members is large and growing, and new members and their perspectives are always welcomed and encouraged. Contributions can take many forms, including technical recommendations, enhancements and additions to the FOCUS documentation, and being part of the testing/feedback process.
How Flexera and FinOps FOCUS team up to save you time and money
Flexera has been a contributing member to the FOCUS project since the early days, and our active participation continues today. As the specifications broaden and evolve to cover other areas of cloud spend (e.g. SaaS), we will continue to share our vision at Flexera and our expertise to further extend the benefits and applicability of FOCUS.
The best way to understand FOCUS is to see a demonstration of our FOCUS integration. Simply reach out to us, mention this blog, and we’ll get you started.
