FinOps Foundation sharpens ‘focus’ on unified Cloud costs

Hidden costs hurt. From the local shop to the supermarket to online sales, any use of so-called stealth pricing or inflation where costs are somehow hidden or confused generally represents a bad deal for customers. In a world where hotels charge resort fees for pool, gym and Wi-Fi use, restaurant guests even reported seeing additional charges on their checks, such as “brand feesTo support growth, or ‘backs’… the latter are imposed if they have chosen to sit on seats instead of the cheaper stool option.

The cost of cloud computing was supposed to be much simpler, cleaner and clearer – except it wasn’t always that way. This is disappointing. The central promise of the Cloud was the ability to move away from burdensome capital expenditure on IT equipment and embrace the freedom of the cloud with its release into the simplicity of operational costs. But cloud contracts are oversold, cloud supplies are often oversubscribed… and the cloud has never been as elastic as the brand promised.

The FinOps Foundation wants to change that.

This part of the Linux Foundation’s non-profit technology consortium is focused on advancing the practice of FinOps, the alignment of software-based financial management tools to span IT operations in a way that supports more cost-effective deployments.

This month sees the foundation define the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (CONCENTRATE) Version 1.0 to create a uniform format for cloud accounts across different cloud providers. Hoping to reduce complexity for FinOps professionals and facilitate the adoption of cloud infrastructure and software, cloud providers including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and Oracle Cloud, officially contributed to the development of Version 1.0. This specification also has a steering committee with all voting members from the cloud providers.

Version 1.0 of the specification is ready for general adoption having gone through a rigorous approval and IP review process. The institution says it expects to see a rapid improvement in data exports (term defined by AWS as a billing and cost management function that allows customers to create exports of billing and cost management data using [database management] column selections and row filters to select the data they want to receive) from cloud billing generators.

“Google has more than 20 years of consuming, building and contributing to open source projects, it’s a core part of our DNA. The FOCUS billing open data project naturally extends our commitment to becoming the most open cloud provider. We want our customers to easily understand their cloud costs so they can spend more time innovating and creating business value — and we believe that with FOCUS we are taking steps toward that reality,” said Pravir Gupta, Vice President of Google Cloud.

Gupta’s comments echo a sentiment also expressed by Fred Delombaerde, vice president of commercial platform and marketplace at Microsoft. Equally optimistic is James Greenfield, AWS’s vice president of commerce platform, who says his team is excited to be part of an effort to make it easier for customers to use cloud financial data to better understand their cloud investments.

We’ve Just Started

The FOCUS specification is said to be just getting started. As the use case library expands, FOCUS contributors, maintainers, and steering committee members are already working on version 1.1 and planning version 1.2. Future developments are expected to support FOCUS data ingestion and reporting, contribute to the adoption of FOCUS terminology across platforms, and help align billing data outputs with the specification’s requirements.

Version 1.0 includes common classification, terminology, and metrics for billing data sets. FOCUS will also be extensible to other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) billing datasets, including networking, observability and security tools. Future updates are expected to add further support for SaaS providers and on-premise datasets.

“Adopting FOCUS now immediately gives cloud consumers the benefit of normalized cloud spend, as well as starts them on a specification journey that will allow them to easily add future spend types as iterations improve it. It solves today’s use cases, but also prepares you for tomorrow’s opportunities,” said Mike Fuller, CTO at FinOps Foundation. “We’ve moved beyond the initial build phase of FOCUS and into the phase where practitioners can use these data sets to perform cross-cloud discount analysis, optimize resource usage, and allocate shared costs. FOCUS makes it easy for organizations to increase value from their cloud investments.”

Fuller explains that FOCUS was created by building a library of over forty common FinOps use cases, each complete with a SQL query that uses FOCUS columns to answer business questions. These use cases offer a standardized approach to extracting answers from billing data and give professionals time back to work on higher priority FinOps capabilities.

“To get to the set of pillars that make FOCUS work, thousands of hours of discussion and revisions went into a working structure that allows community input and contains a set of IP protection procedures to protect adopters from patent infringement concerns. Reaching consensus on a specification takes time and deep discussion with product experts from across the cloud environment. Some conversations around simple labels and column descriptions are the culmination of hundreds of hours of conversations with dozens of contributors,” notes the FinOps Foundation, in a technical statement.

Let’s Go (Cloud) Shopping

As this and the broader FinOps movement evolves, this story will not only be about cost, procurement and financial management. The FinOps dream is also much better for multi-cloud management.

Do you want your multi-cloud concoction this way, with extra this and that, but scaled down something else so it’s partitioned into a more tailored form at a more accurately attributed cost? No problem, have it your way… or that’s where we hope to get at least. Tracy Woo, principal analyst at Forrester, has called this process “advancing the disintermediation of billing” from any particular cloud vendor environment… and she’s right.

“This is a big deal,” Wu said. “[The] The FOCUS 1.0 specification is the first step in a long journey towards the abstract, composable cloud. It removes the burden of knowing the multi-skill set required to manage costs across all the tools and clouds that organizations use to manage and support their IT environment. In this way, organizations can more easily optimize their cloud investments and drive sustainable economic growth.”

Cloud can be easier on costs. If we can make it easier and less complex to use in the mechanical backend at the same time, then we’ll all be happy. Ker-ching, next customer please.