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For engineering teams, aligning with product and finance on how to allocate and track costs can be a huge challenge.
Particularly in complex containerized environments, data from multiple sources (such as from third party tools or ISVs like Databricks or Datadog) in totally different formats often needs to be combined and unified with the data in your cloud provider’s Cost and Usage Report. This can be a major lift and take hours of time just to normalize data, let alone analyze it for optimization purposes.
The good news is that FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification), a newly developed data standard, was created to solve this very problem. Major cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP are on the cusp of adopting it, but not everyone is aware of this game changing new framework.
In this article, we’ll explain what FOCUS is, why it’s important, and how it might change (and improve) your cost analysis and reporting forever.
What is FOCUS?
FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) is a new open-source cloud billing data standardization that makes it much easier to reconcile data from different sources for unified cloud financial reporting and analysis.
Each cloud platform names and organizes the cost data it generates in a different format. For example, compute resources could be called “EC2 instances” in AWS or “Virtual Machines” in Azure. Or, a third-party tool like Kubecost might track different metrics for your Kubernetes usage than your AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR). Needless to say, reconciling datasets consisting of billions of data on your granular resource usage can be a complicated and time-consuming task.
The FOCUS project was created by the FinOps Foundation as a uniform standard for billing data. If it is adopted industry-wide, all datasets will use a shared format (organization, naming and set of metrics).
This will make it simpler and easier to do cost analysis, spend allocation, commitment optimization, invoice reconciliation and unit economic reporting across ALL of your cloud billing data, including your third party ISVs.
What is FOCUS 1.0?
After the initial release of FOCUS .5 in the previous summer, FOCUS 1.0 was released in November 2023. FOCUS 1.0 expanded on the initial specification, extending it to both Cloud and SaaS data sets and including open-source data converter implementations and data validators to accelerate adoption. FOCUS 1.0 passed through a rigorous approval and IP review process.
The FinOps foundation is working on a 1.1 release (slated for November 2024) and further releases in 2025. Future updates are expected to add support for SaaS providers and on-premises datasets.
Why is FOCUS important?
Let’s dive into the key benefits of FinOps FOCUS for engineering and finance teams.
Benefits of FOCUS for engineering teams | |
Easier reporting | With FOCUS, engineers don’t have to spend time on data normalization, freeing you to focus on building and innovating. |
Cheaper data processing | FOCUS combines actual billed costs and amortized costs into one dataset, reducing the cost of compute and storage needed to process this data. |
Better cloud cost management | With all of your cloud financial data accurately reconciled from all sources, it’s easier to get the insights you need to cut waste and stay on budget. |
Easier adoption of new tools & integrations | When adding a new tool, you don’t need to spend time figuring out what format to transform the data into or what the terminology in the data means. |
Become more FinOps enabled | As an engineer, you may not yet be familiar with FinOps. But if the data you work with is consistent with the FinOps framework and technology, you’ll automatically become more FinOps enabled. |
Benefits of FOCUS for finance teams | |
Easier and more accurate reporting | Standardizing billing files in a consistent format reduces errors in reporting due to discrepancies in terminology and definitions of columns across multiple data sources.
This makes it easier to align engineering, product and finance on a shared understanding of cost data. |
Better cost allocation & accountability | Many third party tools are difficult to integrate with the rest of your AWS spend, meaning that a significant costs just get lumped into a general “platform” category.
By making it easy to integrate ALL cost data, teams can understand the exact costs generated by each product, feature or team. |
Calculate business value | Without complete and accurate cost data, it’s difficult to link engineering initiatives to business objectives. With this data, you can calculate COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) and other key metrics to measure return on cloud investments. |
Lower costs | FOCUS eliminates the need to spend costly engineering resources on data reconciliation, and it lowers data processing costs. |
Which cloud providers support FOCUS?
Previously, the command-line utility FOCUS Converter was used to convert billing data files from popular public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud. Now, you can export data directly from the major cloud providers in FOCUS format (good news for multi-cloud management!)
Here are the highlights of FOCUS support by major cloud providers:
- AWS announced support for FOCUS data exports at FinOps X 2024. AWS currently supports FOCUS 1.0.
- Google Cloud offers a FOCUS BigQuery view and Looker Template to export and visualize FOCUS-formatted cost and usage data. Download Google Cloud’s guide to FOCUS v1.0.
- Microsoft Azure has a new FOCUS data Export to download your cost and usage data in the FOCUS format.
- Oracle Cloud supports billing data exports in the FOCUS format, and created a prebuilt function to convert historical files to the FOCUS format.
AWS Cloud Cost Allocation: The Complete Guide
How to get started using FOCUS in AWS
To get started with FOCUS on AWS, follow these steps:
- Log into the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console: Access your AWS account and navigate to the Billing and Cost Management console.
- Navigate to Data Exports: On the left-side navigation bar, click on “Data Exports.”
- Select and Create an Export:
- Choose the table option “FOCUS 1.0 with AWS Columns (Preview).”
- Create an export either directly from the console or by using the command-line interface (CLI) or software development kits (SDKs) (documentation here).
- Set Delivery Frequency: Configure the frequency at which Data Exports will deliver your AWS cost and usage data in the FOCUS 1.0 schema to your designated Amazon S3 bucket.
- Manage Access Permissions:
- Use the IAM action bcm-data-exports:create-export to control access to the FOCUS exports. Specify whether to restrict this to the ‘FOCUS’ table or to all resources (*).
- Ensure that the user also has permissions for the cur:put-report-definition action to manage legacy access controls related to cost and usage data.
- Review the Consolidated Billing Settings (if applicable): If you have enabled Consolidated Billing in your AWS Organizations, the FOCUS export will include cost and usage data for both the management/payer account and all associated member accounts. You can create up to two free exports of the FOCUS table per AWS account.
Reconcile all of your cloud data automatically with nOps
If you’re looking to understand your AWS usage and costs, nOps can help.
nOps Business Contexts transforms millions of rows of contextless data into the who, what, when and why of cloud spend — making it easy to get 100% visibility of your AWS cloud costs and usage so your bills are never a surprise or mystery.
Allocate 100% of your AWS costs. Data reconciliation and normalization is no longer a concern with nOps. nOps unifies ALL of your cost and usage data automatically so you can understand and allocate your complete AWS spend in one platform.
Automated resource tagging. You don’t need to have all your resources tagged to allocate costs. Create dynamic rules by region, tags, operation, accounts, and usage types to automatically allocate costs back to custom cost centers.
40+ views & filters. Map hourly costs by any relevant engineering concept (deployment, service, namespace, label, pod, container…) or finance concept (cost unit, purchase type, line item, cost allocation tag…).
Custom reports & dashboards for the whole team. Monthly reporting and reconciliation can take hours; with nOps only minutes. Tailor dashboards and Slack/email reports to your needs, whether you’re a CFO or VP of Engineering.
The best part? nOps is an all-in-one solution for all of your AWS cloud optimization needs: automated commitment management, rightsizing, resource scheduling, workload management, Spot usage, storage optimization, and more.
Join our customers using nOps to understand your cloud costs and leverage automation with complete confidence by booking a demo today!
More FOCUS resources
If you’re interested in learning more about FOCUS, here are additional resources to consult.
- The FOCUS specification or “FinOps column library” is available at no cost via an open-source license for those who generate billing data, by those consuming or analyzing cost or usage data, or by organizations who wish to normalize the billing data they receive.
- The FinOps use case library is a collection of over 40 common FinOps use cases, each with an SQL query that uses FOCUS columns to answer business questions.
- FOCUS FAQ answers some frequently asked questions about FOCUS.
- FOCUS 1.0 specifies the features available in FOCUS 1.0 and offers more history and context surrounding the release.
- FOCUS Training & Certification Center offers two courses, one introductory class and one certification course, for more in-depth knowledge about the standard.
