Saturday, March 1, 2025

FOCUS: Understanding Cloud Cost Transparency Standards

Data is crucial in FinOps. Data is essential for understanding cloud cost and usage patterns and making wise cloud strategy and operations decisions. Microsoft is happy to be a founding member of the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) initiative and excited to contribute Cost Management capabilities after FOCUS 1.0 is released later this year. Start ready for FOCUS by reading the specification, joining the community, and sharing your use cases and needs.

What’s focus?

FOCUS is a pioneering billing data format effort that helps enterprises identify cost and usage patterns and optimize expenditure and performance across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises services.

FOCUS will give enterprises a uniform, clear, and accessible picture of their cost data for FinOps allocation, analytics, monitoring, and optimization. FOCUS, FinOps’ new “language,” will help practitioners interact better with colleagues and enhance transferability and onboarding for new team members, getting them up and running faster. Along with the FinOps Framework, practitioners will have the tools to streamline their practice and optimize cloud value.

FOCUS is needed by organizations

Microsoft cloud services’ versatility lets you build extraordinary things while only paying for what you need, when you need it. This flexibility allows for alternative operating models that bill services and can be tweaked based on various parameters. When services are paid differently, their cost and usage data vary, making allocation, analysis, monitoring, and optimization difficult. This extends beyond Microsoft’s cloud services. Organizations often use SaaS, licensed, on-premises, or other clouds, which make data exchange in proprietary forms worse.

FOCUS solves this problem by creating a provider and service neutral data definition that helps enterprises evaluate and quantify the economic value of their cloud investments. FOCUS will help firms spend more time creating value and less time struggling to understand data due to discrepancies and unfamiliarity with diverse services and providers.

More than just a few fields are discussed. The conversation will help define best practices and standards for a cloud computing sector expanding into SaaS, IoT, and Gen AI. Standards we consider now will shape cost discussions in decades to come. It’s thrilling.Senior Director of Engineering, Cloud Cost Management at Walmart Global Tech, Tim O’Brien.

Why Microsoft values FOCUS

Microsoft and other cloud and SaaS firms would push a standard billing data specification, but why? Because Azure is meant for innovation and experimentation, consistent cloud billing encourages it. Knowing how you’re paid and being able to measure cost against other business requirements makes it easier to design and optimize Azure applications iteratively utilizing current architectures. Better business, technical, and finance team collaboration will boost your firm’s productivity, which aligns with our purpose to enable everyone and every organization to succeed.

At FinOps X 2022, Udam Dewaraja proposed that the FinOps community and service providers collaborate to create an open billing data specification. I was intrigued but skeptical that major cloud providers would adopt and support the new dimensions and metrics. At the initial FOCUS meeting, Microsoft’s Cost Management team proved me incorrect, and my mistrust immediately faded!”Irena Jurica, CloudVane, Neos Solution Architect.

Widespread FOCUS usage will enable allocating, analyzing, monitoring, and optimizing expenditures among providers as straightforward as using one, letting you do more with less. When migrating to a company that employs several clouds or SaaS solutions, FinOps practitioners, vendors, and consultants will be more efficient and productive. Instead of mastering proprietary data formats, firms can focus on value-added FinOps skills.

Microsoft adoption of FOCUS removes a barrier to cloud adoption and helps enterprises make better data-driven cloud use decisions that create business value on the Microsoft cloud.

Starting FOCUS

In June 2023, FOCUS 0.5 offered a common manner to describe essential concepts for all providers.

ResourceId, ResourceName, and ServiceName and ServiceCategory identify resources. ServiceCategory is noteworthy since it lets you categorize costs into top-level categories across cloud providers. The Region a resource was deployed to, the PublisherName of the service developer, and the ProviderName of the cloud where the service was consumed are also visible.

All charges include a ChargeType (use or purchase), ChargePeriodStart and ChargePeriodEnd dates, and BilledCost and AmortizedCost amounts. This is a big change from current Cost Management: with FOCUS, you can query all your data at once, which should speed up processing and reduce storage size for anyone exporting both datasets.

All charges have BillingPeriodStart and BillingPeriodEnd dates, a BillingAccountId and BillingAccountName that indicate the scope at which your invoices are generated, a SubAccountId and SubAccountName that indicate the lower-level subscription account where resources are managed, and an InvoiceIssuerName that indicates the organization you receive invoices from. Since Microsoft Customer Agreement generates invoices in your billing profile, the BillingAccountId is related to it. Microsoft Cloud consumers will need to know this due to the terminology. SubAccountId, tied to your subscription, is a new cross-cloud concept for cost allocation and chargeback.

Working with data is better than reading about FOCUS. To test FOCUS, download an example Power BI report from the FinOps toolkit, an open source collection of reusable solutions to jumpstart your FinOps activities.

FOCUS
Image credit to Microsoft

This report can be connected to your data via the Power BI Cost Management connection or a FinOps hub data pipeline.

A small sample dataset and other open datasets can be utilized for data ingestion and cleansing by data enthusiasts.

Finally, you may use the FinOps toolkit PowerShell module’s Invoke-FinOpsSchemaTransform or ConvertTo-FinOpsSchema command to convert your own FOCUS data. These scripts convert tiny datasets to FOCUS using a familiar command line interface.

Looking forward to FOCUS 1.0

But this was just the start. Microsoft are thrilled to join the FinOps community and lead FOCUS toward 1.0. Teams of project participants are working backwards from FinOps practitioners’ use cases to advance FOCUS 1.0. Practitioners define columns for consistent cost allocation, commitment-based discounts, unit cost measures, KPIs, and more. Squads are creating the specification to establish consistent usage, pricing, cost measurements, credits, discounts, and prepaid cost aspects.

FOCUS is crucial for our industry and global FinOps adoption. Microsoft is honored to be on the FinOps Foundation’s Governing Board, Technical Advisory Council, and FOCUS Steering Committee.

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