Why FOCUS?

Moving from one FinOps engagement to another requires a change in outlook depending on the CSP(Azure, AWS, GCP, Oracle etc.) platform leveraged by the client for their cloud needs. For working on any FinOps capabilities, the cloud billing data is of the utmost importance. But deciphering cloud bills from different CSP can sometimes be a daunting job. Some of the common challenges faced by a FinOps practitioner while working with different billing formats of CSP are as follows

1) No Common Lexicon: There is no standard cloud usage or billing data language. Each provider shares data in a proprietary format. E.g.

• Azure uses "Meter-Category" while AWS uses "lineItem/ProductCode" to identify the top-level service for which the usage belongs in the billing data.
• The region called “us-west1” in GCP is called “us-west-1” in AWS. One needs to realize that these two different labels mean the same region and link them in the internal billing system.

2) Multiple Cost Datasets: Though one can have different cost views in the native cost explorer dashboard but to build custom views outside the native tool one needs to export multiple cost datasets. For reservation analysis, practitioners need to export both actual (billed) and amortized cost datasets from Azure because reservation purchase is available in the actual cost dataset while amortized price used for chargeback and unused reservation is available in the amortized cost dataset.

3) Different Resource Hierarchy: Every cloud platform has a concept of multi-tenancy. At the most basic level, every resource or service in a cloud platform belongs to a tenant. However, different CSPs have different resource hierarchies for governing workloads.

• AWS: Organization → Organization Unit → Account → Resources
• Azure: Root Management Group → Management Group → Subscription → Resource Group → Resources
• GCP: Organization → Folder → Project → Resources

Because of this, understanding billing data granularity can be tricky and time-intensive.

But not anymore, FinOps Foundation FOCUS(FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) is a technical specification and toolkit to build and maintain an open standard for cloud cost, usage, and billing data across all major cloud service providers. FOCUS will reduce the struggle of organizations to understand variation in data caused by inconsistencies between and unfamiliarity with different services and providers. The above-mentioned challenges are supposed to be addressed by FOCUS.

1) For drilling into detailed usage different CSPs use different terms. In GCP the column name is “skuDescription". But in AWS, the same column would be termed as “item description.” In Azure, it would be “service description”. But going forward every CSP can use the standard FOCUS term “usagecategory”. Practitioners would be able to process and analyze a single unified data format and nomenclature.

2) Framework advises CSP to provide "BilledCost" and "AmortizedCost" amounts column in the same billing report. With this, all the data could be queried at once, which would speed up processing times and reduce storage size for anyone exporting both the datasets.

3)Focus introduced a standardized way to describe fundamental concepts which apply to any provider. Resources are to be identified by a "ResourceId" and "ResourceName" and organized into their respective "ServiceName" and "ServiceCategory".

Though still in the formative stage, FOCUS holds a lot of potential in establishing a provider and service agnostic data specification that addresses some of the biggest challenges organizations face in managing the value of their cloud investments.