AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle partner to make cloud spend more transparent

As businesses move to the cloud, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine how and where they spend their money. Different SaaS providers and cloud platforms use their own definitions to determine how they report expenses for these companies. In addition to this, they also make this data available in different formats. All of this has given rise to FinOps, a new practice that aims to make cloud spending more accountable.

THE FinOps Foundation announced today the first preview of its founding project: the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specifications (TO FOCUS). The companies involved here include companies you’d typically think of as competitors, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle Cloud, IBM, Meta, VMware, and large cloud users like Walmart and Capital One, as well as service providers like Atlassian , Twilio, Datadog and Snowflake. The fact that these companies are working together to create this specification shows how pervasive this problem is.

“We are making FOCUS the foundational lexicon of FinOps by providing a vendor-neutral, open-source specification with a unified schema and language,” said Mike Fuller, CTO of the FinOps Foundation. “With this release, we are paving the way for FOCUS to enable collaboration between leading cloud providers, FinOps providers, leading SaaS providers, and forward-thinking FinOps companies to establish a unified, usable framework for enterprise data. cloud billing, thereby increasing trust in data. and make it easier to understand the value of cloud spending.

The idea behind FOCUS is to create a basic framework that standardizes cost and usage data between SaaS and cloud providers. The specification itself (PDF) includes definitions of commonly used terms and the type of metrics providers should associate with them.

Before the specification reaches version 1.0, project members expect to be able to use the specification and deliver a library of real-world use cases curated by FinOps practitioners like Capital One, among others.

“FOCUS, an initiative led by the FinOps Foundation, is the result of years of effort by organizations frustrated by large and complex invoices,” said Lee Sustar, analyst at Forrester. note earlier this year. “With the support of cloud users such as large banks and retailers, FOCUS is gaining momentum.”