Highlights:
- FOCUS tackles the issue of varying nomenclatures cloud providers use in their financial datasets, which can result in calculation errors in a company’s financial software.
- In June, FOCUS is scheduled to launch its initial version. It will put a lot of emphasis on gathering information that shows how much and how often an organization uses infrastructure as a service.
Recently, the FinOps Foundation unveiled FOCUS, an open-source project intended to make it easier for businesses to keep tabs on their cloud expenses.
The initiative aims to create a standard specification for classifying cloud usage and spending data. FOCUS will offer a variety of related data management capabilities in the future. The project’s steering committee will include Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC, two of the most prominent players in the cloud market.
“FOCUS will solve problems that organizations maturing their cloud adoption now face,” said Udam Dewaraja, the FOCUS working group chair for the FinOps Foundation. “Today, there’s no clear way to unify cost and usage data sets across different vendors.”
Financial data generated by cloud platforms provide information on customers’ infrastructure usage, associated costs, and timing. Companies can utilize this data for accounting tasks, including forecasting future spending. However, formatting hurdles often make such tasks difficult, as highlighted by the FinOps Foundation.
Analyzing financial data generated by cloud platforms can be challenging because each platform uses a different format to organize its data. This becomes especially complex when dealing with large datasets. Fortunately, the FinOps Foundation has introduced the FOCUS project to simplify the process.
FOCUS tackles the issue of varying nomenclatures cloud providers use in their financial datasets, which can result in calculation errors in a company’s financial software. For instance, compute expenses may be referred to as “instance spending” by one provider and “virtual machine costs” by another.
FOCUS has introduced standardized terminology to describe cloud expenses, usage metrics, and a standardized schema for organizing financial information. This schema includes technical details such as the maximum expenses in each database row.
In June, FOCUS is scheduled to launch its initial version. It will put a lot of emphasis on gathering information that shows how much and how often an organization uses infrastructure-as-a-service. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) tools, and other technologies will all be supported in the upcoming releases.
The FinOps Foundation also plans other ways to increase FOCUS’ feature set. It aims to build a system enabling users to compile financial data from various services into a single repository for easier processing. The group will also incorporate scorecards to monitor how much various cloud platforms and products support the FOCUS specification.
