FOCUS: Automate Cost Monitoring in your Cloud
It goes without saying that the efficient use of personnel and funds is crucial to corporate operations, and requires ongoing observation and decision-making about which costs are necessary and which are not.
However, gathering the necessary metrics for such decisions has traditionally required building complex systems. FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification), introduced by the FinOps Foundation, provides a standardized approach to cloud service usage and payment data, simplifying and automating these decision-making processes.
Bloating Cloud Costs
In recent years, spending on cloud services for business activities has been steadily increasing due to the proliferation of cloud computing and SaaS, a trend that is expected to continue.
According to the latest data, in the second quarter of 2024 Google Cloud Platform (GCP) saw a 29% year-on-year revenue increase, while both Azure and AWS experienced a 19% YoY revenue growth (Source).
Cloud costs are highly flexible, as usage rates can be adjusted instantly. Compared to hiring personnel or outsourcing, cloud spending is far more fluid and controllable. However, without close and continuous monitoring, it can lead to significant waste.
Therefore, maintaining continuous oversight and control of these high-volume, adjustable cloud costs can greatly influence the optimal allocation of management resources.
Understanding data across multiple services is incredibly complex
Invoices are formatted differently for each service.
Cloud service providers publish usage data in proprietary formats. As a result, analyzing costs across multiple cloud services requires building complex systems for data integration.
Incurring additional costs for cost management defeats the original goal of the "optimal allocation of resources" and is a situation that should be avoided.
FOCUS Cloud Cost Uniformity Standard
FOCUS is an open-source technical standard for cloud cost and usage data, proposed and managed by the FinOps Foundation.
Simply put, it provides a unified format for invoices issued by AWS, Azure, GCP, and other cloud providers.
In addition to the major cloud providers, a growing number of SaaS companies and other businesses are beginning to adopt this format.
Reference: https://focus.finops.org/contributing-members/
By outputting cloud service usage data in the FOCUS format, analyzing data across multiple services becomes significantly easier. Once the analysis pipeline is established, the additional effort required to integrate new services is greatly reduced.
Begin analysis immediately
FOCUS defines 43 columns for use in cloud billing files, with each column assigned a unique name, ID, description, and specific requirements.
This eliminates the need for preprocessing billing data across multiple platforms, enabling direct analysis of data obtained through APIs and other sources.
The dashboard below is an example of one built in Microsoft Power BI using FOCUS-formatted data. It allows businesses to make informed decisions by visualizing costs by service category, region, and other factors, as well as tracking total monthly expenses.
With FOCUS, tagging is no longer required, as it is included by default.
Reference: https://focus.finops.org/get-started/microsoft/
FOCUS enables automation of the optimal distribution of management resources
We hope you now recognize the value of FOCUS as a vital tool for visualizing and analyzing cloud costs with minimal effort, aiding in the efficient allocation of management resources. Thanks to an active community, a wealth of open-source knowledge is available, in addition to the Power BI templates we've introduced —the FinOps Foundation also provides SQL-based use cases: link.