If you ask a cloud engineer what their greatest problem is, they might say, "Securing Kubernetes, managing multi-cloud or finding staff who know what they're doing."
If you ask a CFO, we bet they'll say, "Managing cloud costs." They have a good reason. It's a major pain. Now, in a significant move aimed at streamlining cloud financial management, the FinOps Foundation, a subsidiary of The Linux Foundation, unveiled a new initiative named the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) to address this problem.
What is FinOps?
FinOps is a portmanteau of “Finance” and “DevOps.” And as you'd guess, it's all about getting business and engineering teams on the same page. Cloud management company Vega Cloud CEO Kris Bliesner summed it up well, "FinOps is the unnatural intersection of the tech users of cloud infrastructure and the finance people who try to make sense of the spend."
FOCUS is aimed at developing and maintaining an open specification for cloud cost, usage and billing data presentation. Tech giants Google Cloud and Microsoft are on board as founding members and will also serve on the FOCUS steering committee. Amazon Web Services (AWS), however, is not a FinOps Foundation member and has yet to say anything about FOCUS.
As more businesses turn to cloud services for their operational needs, there is a growing demand for a unified view of expenditures linked with cloud-based applications and services. The FOCUS project addresses this need by establishing a standard framework for cloud cost data presentation.
After all, as a Vega Cloud report states, "48% of IT executives expect to reduce their IT spending a little or a lot in 2023, and 65% said that reducing their cloud spending would be a goal for this year."
Altogether three-quarters of IT execs surveyed said they plan to cut cloud costs by 10-50% in 2023. To do that effectively, they must know precisely what they're spending on what services.
By standardizing billing data and standardizing reporting across multiple vendors, FOCUS aims to reduce the complexity and overhead involved in processes such as allocation, chargeback, budgeting, forecasting, and other FinOps functions. The bottom line? Optimize business value in the cloud.
FOCUSing on the target
Initially, FOCUS will target infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers but plans to broaden its scope to software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and on-premise costs. The goal is to ensure unified cost reporting across spending categories and platforms.
The project will foster collaboration between major cloud providers, FinOps tool vendors, prominent SaaS providers, and FinOps enterprises, Today, these grapple with divergent terminology, pricing and billing concepts across billing sources. It will do this in part by introducing a common FinOps-compatible format for cloud billing data.
"FOCUS is the much-needed solution for organizations on the cusp of maturing their cloud adoption," said Udam Dewaraja, former head of global cloud financial management at Citi, who will chair the initial FOCUS working group.
Dewaraja believes a vendor-neutral, open-source specification with uniform schema and terminology will significantly propel both FinOps and the companies that rely upon it forward.
The initial release, slated for June at the FinOps X conference, will chiefly address foundational FinOps cost reporting use cases for Cloud Service Provider (CSP) cost and usage data sets.
Subsequent versions will progressively expand to include non-cloud data sets, document FinOps capabilities, include open-source data converter implementations and data validators, introduce vendor scorecards, harmonize terminology, provide a common repository for data ingestion, enable changes to billing data providers' output formats, and add a repository of code enabling users to query their vendor APIs or cloud billing data. The FinOps Foundation hopes to have version 1.0 out the door in September.
The open-source specification will be freely available for licensed use by anyone.
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