#11. Explaining FinOps FOCUS to my Grandmother.

FinOps FOCUS has been the focus of the FinOps Foundation for some time now. At FinOps X, there were many discussions about it, and people got really excited. If you're feeling left out or worried about not keeping up with the latest trend, don't worry! This article will help you understand FOCUS in essence and decide if you want to use it.

TL;DR

• FinOps FOCUS is an open source (i.e., free 😃) specification created by the FinOps Foundation. It helps make cloud billing easier to understand. It creates a standard way for different cloud providers, SaaS provider or others to show their costs and usage data. This means you can now look at all your cloud bills in the same format, making it easier to compare and analyze them.
• FOCUS is becoming more popular and widely used. It's on its way to becoming a standard in the industry. The sooner you start using it, the more advantages you'll gain from it.

Why to use FOCUS?

The answer is Billing Data Normalization.

Here is a common scenario: Imagine you're using all three major cloud providers (GCP, AWS, and Azure). You want to understand how much you've been paying for cloud commitments across all three. While AWS and Azure use similar (but not identical) taxonomy and terminology—namely savings plans, reserved instances, and spot instances—GCP has its own (e.g., CUDs). This makes it very difficult to compare or assess resources that originate from different sources.

Normalization in this case means we introduce common taxonomy, terminology, and metrics for billing across all cloud vendors (and potentially other providers), which outputs a unified  datasets with the same set of properties and attributes, allowing us to have accurate comparisons between resource which make data analysis straight forward. (i.e., now we can compare apples to apples).

What can I do with Normalized Datasets?

Using the same words and data format across different teams, specially when you have multiple sources of billing data (e.g., you run a multi cloud strategy in your organization) makes working together easier. IT, engineering, and finance can now understand each other better when talking about cloud costs. Beside consistency, FOCUS brings billing data transparency. With normalized data, multiple people in your organization can create valuable business intelligence from the billing information. Here are some examples:

• A cloud engineer can identify the most commonly used virtual machine specifications across all three clouds (e.g., 16GB RAM, with processor XYZ, running Linux).
• A business owner can calculate to the penny how much their application costs, even with resources spread across multiple clouds.
• The organization can develop its own analytical dashboards (e.g., in PowerBI) to allocate costs and better understand cloud spending, without investing in expensive tools.

How could I use FOCUS?

To get started with FOCUS, familiarize yourself with its structure, including column taxonomy and terminology. The getting started pages offer an excellent introduction. For a deeper understanding, consider pursuing the FOCUS certification. Additionally, explore the GitHub repository, where you'll find valuable resources on normalizing cloud billing data.

Summary

The FOCUS specification can be applied to multiple cloud, SaaS, and other technology vendors to normalize their data into a unified and consistent dataset. This makes it easier to analyze, reduces data complexity, and brings greater transparency to cloud billing.

Thanks for reading! Share if you found it helpful. Have questions or suggestions for future topics? We'd love to hear from you!

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