The FinOps Foundation, a part of The Linux Foundation's non-profit technology consortium focused on advancing the people and practice of FinOps, announced the General Availability (GA) of the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) Version 1.0.
By creating a uniform format for cloud bills across different cloud providers, FOCUS reduces complexity for FinOps practitioners and eases adoption of cloud infrastructure and software.
All of the leading cloud providers, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), and Oracle Cloud, have all formally contributed to the development of Version 1.0. FOCUS boasts a Steering Committee with voting members from leading cloud providers as well as practitioners from some of the largest and most advanced cloud users in the world.
Today, the specification's 1.0 release is ready for general adoption having passed through a rigorous approval and IP review process. In the coming months, the Foundation expects to see improving data exports from billing generators such as the clouds, platforms, private cloud, and SaaS providers.
While this is an early major milestone in the FOCUS journey, the specification is just getting started. As the Use Case Library expands, FOCUS contributors, maintainers and steering committee members are already working on the 1.1 release and planning for the 1.2 release. The depth and quality of the spec will increase over time and the project expects to see billing generators (e.g. the clouds) increase the quality of their FOCUS outputs. As adoption grows, more vendors plan to support FOCUS data ingestion and reporting, adopt FOCUS terminology in their platforms, and align billing data outputs to the requirements in the specification.
Version 1.0 includes common taxonomy, terminology, and metrics for billing datasets produced by cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. FOCUS will be extensible to other cloud 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-premises datasets.
"Adopting FOCUS now immediately gives cloud consumers the benefit of normalized cloud spend, plus starts them on a journey with the specification that will allow them to easily add future types of spending as iterative releases improve it. It solves for today's use cases, but it also sets you up for tomorrow's opportunities," said Mike Fuller, CTO at the FinOps Foundation. "We've moved beyond the initial building phase for FOCUS and into the phase where practitioners can use these datasets to perform multi-cloud discount analysis, optimize resource usage, and allocate shared costs. FOCUS makes it easier for organizations to increase value from their cloud investments."
To help realize business value, FinOps practitioners worked with the FinOps Foundation to build a library of over forty common FinOps use cases, each complete with an SQL query that leverages FOCUS columns to answer critical business questions. These use cases offer a standardized approach to extracting answers from billing data and give practitioners time back to work on higher priority FinOps capabilities.
To get to this simple set of columns that makes FOCUS so impactful, thousands of hours of discussion and reviews occurred in an operational structure that allows community inputs, and contains a set of IP protections processes to protect adopters from patent infringement concerns. Getting to consensus on a specification takes time, and deep discussion with product experts from the entire environment of cloud. Some conversations around simple labels and column descriptions are the culminations of hundreds of hours of conversations with dozens of contributors.
"The general availability of the FOCUS 1.0 specification represents not only a pivotal step in IT cost management but also a huge step forward in supporting multicloud strategies in billing disintermediation from any specific vendor environment. This is a BIG deal. All organizations of any size and at any point in their cloud journey and across all industries will benefit immensely. FOCUS 1.0 is the first step in a long journey towards the abstractable, composable cloud. It removes the burden of the multi-skill set knowledge required to manage costs across all of the tools and clouds organizations use to manage and support their IT environment. In doing so, organizations can more easily optimize their cloud investments and drive sustainable financial growth," said Tracy Woo, Forrester Principal Analyst.
Hot Topic
The Latest
For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...
As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...
The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...
The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...
Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...
Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...
Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ...
Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...
Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...