Key points:
- The FinOps Foundation has released the FOCUS 1.3 specification, which aims to standardize billing data across multiple cloud providers and platforms, making it easier for organizations to manage their technology spending.
- The new specification addresses three major technical challenges: splitting shared resource costs, tracking contract commitments, and verifying data freshness and completeness.
- The FinOps practice has expanded beyond cloud cost management to include hybrid infrastructure, SaaS, and data center spending, with over 100,000 practitioners and 96 of the Fortune 100 participating in FinOps Foundation programs.
As a reporter, I’ve been following the developments in the FinOps space, and the latest release of the FOCUS 1.3 specification is a significant milestone. The FinOps Foundation, a leading organization in the movement, has been working to standardize how providers format billing data, making it easier for organizations to compare costs across multiple platforms. The FOCUS specification, first released in 2023, has gained traction among major cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Google, Oracle, AWS, Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent, as well as platform providers like Databricks and Grafana.
The FOCUS 1.3 specification addresses three major technical challenges that have been plaguing organizations. Firstly, it introduces allocation-specific columns that expose the methodology providers use to split costs across workloads, making it easier for practitioners to verify that provider allocation methods align with their internal cost models and chargeback systems. This is particularly useful for organizations running multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters or shared database instances.
Secondly, the specification creates a dedicated Contract Commitment dataset separate from cost and usage data, making it easier for organizations to track reserved instances, savings plans, and committed use discounts across multiple cloud providers. This change enables different access controls, allowing finance teams to view contract terms and commitment status while operations teams access only the usage data they need for capacity planning.
Lastly, FOCUS 1.3 requires providers to include metadata indicating whether data is complete or subject to revision, making it easier for organizations to build logic that checks completeness status before triggering dependent processes. This change helps prevent automated cost reconciliation workflows from failing due to incomplete billing data.
The FinOps practice has undergone significant expansion since the FOCUS specification first launched in 2023. What began as a cloud cost management discipline has evolved into a comprehensive approach for managing technology value across diverse infrastructure types, including hybrid infrastructure, SaaS, and data center spending. The FinOps Foundation’s community has grown to approximately 100,000 practitioners, and the organization now includes major cloud vendors, hardware providers like Nvidia and AMD, data center operators, and data cloud platforms like Snowflake and Databricks.
The FOCUS 1.3 release reflects the maturation of the FinOps practice, addressing technical gaps that have emerged as organizations apply cost management practices across increasingly complex hybrid environments. As Matt Cowsert, principal product manager at the FinOps Foundation, noted, "Our goal is to ensure that each release for FOCUS has material benefit for practitioners." With the latest release, the FinOps Foundation is helping organizations to better manage their technology spending and make more informed decisions about their infrastructure investments. The FinOps Foundation is committed to continuing to evolve the FOCUS specification to meet the changing needs of organizations, and we can expect to see further updates and improvements in the future.
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