Key Insight: Version 1.1, the fourth release of the FOCUS Specification, is now available for cloud vendors and FinOps Practitioners to adopt. This version adds new Columns that deepen support for billing data generated by cloud service providers, giving Practitioners the ability to do more granular, multi-vendor analysis. The community can expect incremental releases roughly twice per year over the next several years as the Specification is expanded to support SaaS datasets and other technology cost data. We recommend that Practitioners and vendors begin adoption now.

What’s New in v1.1

The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS™) Version 1.1 was ratified by the FOCUS Steering Committee on November 7, 2024. This fourth release of the Specification adds new Columns that deepen support for billing data generated by cloud service providers, giving FinOps Practitioners the ability to do more granular multi-cloud analysis on that multi-cloud data. This release also improves metadata to better support Extract Transform Load (ETL) processes, and includes normative changes for some existing FOCUS Columns.

Adoption of FOCUS

Cloud service providers, cloud vendors, and FinOps tool and service providers can now begin updating their offerings to align with version 1.1. Practitioners should expect that adoption of the Specification will happen at a different pace for each vendor, which is why some vendors (e.g., AWS and Microsoft) have published a FOCUS conformance report for their exports to help the community in the meantime.

Practitioner Adoption

With the launch of FOCUS 1.0 in June 2024, FinOps Practitioners could get their own cloud billing data in the FOCUS format from four of the leading cloud service providers. That milestone marked the first time that Practitioners could merge billing data from these sources without applying any proprietary normalization schemas.

This latest release – Version 1.1 – enables Practitioners to perform deeper analysis on this unified multi-cloud data by delivering more granular Columns. It also delivers improved FOCUS metadata for building tools and automation to manage this data. Practitioners are beginning to use these uniform datasets to uncover insights that inform decision-making when performing FinOps Capabilities.

See how GitLab, Zoom, Citi, European Parliament, and The Australian Retirement Trust are using FOCUS to unify billing data from multiple cloud vendors.

GitLab unifies data from multiple vendors with FOCUS™: Clément Leroux, Staff FinOps Engineer, shares how GitLab is leveraging FOCUS to unify data from multiple cloud and SaaS vendors to improve visibility and cost allocation, understand unit economics, and enable data-driven optimization.

Vendor Adoption

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) have released support for FOCUS datasets. AWS and Azure are producing FOCUS conformance reports to indicate what their current exports are missing with respect to the latest version of the Specification.

AWS – 1.0
Google Cloud – 1.0
Microsoft Azure – 1.0
OCI – 1.0

FinOps tool vendors and FinOps service providers are also adopting the requirements of the Specification and its terminology for their offerings. Current tooling capabilities typically include the ability to ingest FOCUS datasets and/or report using FOCUS attributes and metrics.

Release Details

All changes have been documented on GitHub so FOCUS 1.0, 1.0 Preview, and 0.5 users can adopt the incremental improvements with minimal disruptions. You can also view the Changelog on the FOCUS website.

New Columns

Version 1.1 of the FOCUS Specification includes new Columns that unlock important benefits:

New Columns in Version 1.1:

New Spec Column(s)	Key Changes and Benefits
CapacityReservationId CapacityReservationStatus	Support for capacity reservations. Two new Columns – CapacityReservationId and CapacityReservationStatus – enable capacity reservations to be explicitly represented in FOCUS datasets. The ID is a unique identifier assigned by the provider and the Status indicates if the capacity is used or unused. Previously, there was no dedicated mechanism to show the usage and cost of capacity reservations in FOCUS datasets. Now, Practitioners can model and optimize capacity reservations alongside other on-demand and committed spending.
CommitmentDiscountQuantity CommitmentDiscountUnit	Commitment Discounts usage visibility. Two new Columns – CommitmentDiscountQuantity and CommitmentDiscountUnit – help Practitioners track, report on, and optimize the use of commitment discounts. Quantity tells the amount of a commitment discount that has been purchased or accounted for. The amount will be denominated in a provider-specific measurement Unit. These two Columns give deeper visibility into how commitment discount purchases are amortized across eligible resources.
ServiceSubcategory	Deeper Service classification. The Column ServiceSubcategory was added to enable more granular service classification. This addition moves the Specification beyond the highest-level service categorization to a sub-categorization for services. For example, a ServiceCategory called ‘Compute’ was available in v1.0. Version 1.1 adds these subcategories under ‘Compute’: Containers, End User Computing, Quantum Compute, Serverless Compute, Virtual Machines, Other (Compute). With the new Column ServiceSubcategory, Practitioners can understand what they are spending money on at a more granular level, and use that data to generate actionable recommendations. For example, with this granularity, Practitioners can compare the cost of a service in different environments.
SkuPriceDetails SkuMeter	Additional SKU data. Two new Columns – SkuPriceDetails and SkuMeter – provide deeper visibility into the SkuPriceId and SkuId Columns that were available in FOCUS v1.0. SkuPriceDetails describe both qualitative and quantitative properties of a SkuPriceId, such as the name of the SKU, the number of cores of a SKU, GB of memory of a SKU, whether it was purchased on-demand or via commitment, or whether a commitment was for 1 or 3 years. SkuMeter describes the functionality being metered or measured by a particular SKU in a charge. Providers often have billing models in which multiple SKUs exist for a given service to describe and bill for different functionalities for that service. For example, an object storage service may have separate SKUs for functionalities such as object storage, API requests, data transfer, encryption, and object management. This field helps practitioners understand which functionalities are being metered by the different SKUs that appear in a FOCUS dataset. (Currently, this Column is a combination of AWS Usage Type and Azure Meter.) These two new SKU-related Columns allow Practitioners to make optimization recommendations based on resource/service-level data.

Improved Metadata

This release also improves support for billing metadata to enable ETL (Extract Transform Load) processes, robust workflows, and deeper data analysis.

The goal for these metadata improvements is to allow Practitioners to identify which rules the data is compliant with so they can build a sustainable data model without needing to reprocess historical raw billing files into the current format.

Metadata updates include:

Format must be provided in the defined metadata schema.
Must be a serialized JSON string, consistent with the ECMA 404 definition of an object.
Must not be null.
Must include a reference to the schema of the data.
Schema reference must not be in the FOCUS dataset itself.
Must be an accurate and complete representation of the provided FOCUS dataset.
Metadata implementation should be publicly documented.

SchemaId metadata schema property updates:

Recommended to be a globally unique identifier (GUID) instead of a universally unique identifier (UUID) or SemVer version.

Normative changes to existing Columns

The following rules have been made for FOCUS Columns that existed before version 1.1:

CommitmentDiscountId column updates:
- Must be globally unique within the provider.
- Should be a fully-qualified identifier.
ConsumedQuantity column updates:
- Must be null when CommitmentDiscountStatus is “Unused”.
ConsumedUnit column updates:
- Must be null when ChargeClass is not “Correction” and ChargeCategory is not “Usage”.
- Must be null when ChargeClass is not “Correction” and ChargeCategory is “Usage” and CommitmentDiscountStatus is “Unused”.
- May be null when ChargeCategory is “Usage” and ChargeClass is “Correction”.
EffectiveCost column updates:
- When CommitmentDiscountStatus is “Unused”, must be the difference between the used commitment discount amount and the portion of the total commitment discount purchase applicable for the charge period.
PricingCategory column updates:
- Must not be “Committed” when the charge is for a commitment discount purchase.
SkuPriceId column updates:
- SkuId can be used if the provider does not have a SkuPriceId but other requirements must be met.

See all v1.1 changes here.

Looking Ahead to SaaS

Adoption of the Specification and of FOCUS datasets is just beginning for cloud vendors and FinOps Practitioners. We expect that in the coming year, FOCUS will gain deeper and broader adoption across the industry, particularly among SaaS observability vendors, and among Practitioners who are bringing IaaS and SaaS costs together.

Release Planning and Roadmap

The FOCUS Steering Committee and Maintainers are now engaging in roadmap development and release planning. Version 1.2 is expected to be released in June 2025 and introduce support for SaaS concepts.

Vendors and Practitioners can expect incremental releases roughly twice per year over the next several years as the Specification is expanded to provide the data elements necessary to perform additional FinOps Capabilities and integrate additional types of IT spending.

Engage with FOCUS

There are many ways that Practitioners and vendors can get involved with developing and improving the Specification and related resources. Ask a question in our Slack channel #chat-focus, tell us your needs for FOCUS, or suggest a FOCUS use case.

Additionally, anyone with a Github account is welcome to create and/or comment on an issue in the FOCUS GitHub repository.

Formal Participation

To contribute to the development and maintenance of the FOCUS Specification, your organization must review the Member Agreement and sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

Organizations that sign the CLA can designate Contributors to the FOCUS Project who may then contribute issues, content, or pull requests to the Project work products.

You do not need to be a Member of the FinOps Foundation to become a FOCUS Contributing Member, and there is no cost to contribute to FOCUS.

Informal Participation

If you are unable to or uninterested in becoming a formal Contributing Member, but still wish to share needs and use cases, please join the FOCUS User Group.

These practitioner-led, vendor-neutral, interactive, one-hour virtual discussions are for you to get into deep conversations about the Project, the Specification, FOCUS datasets, and implementing FinOps using FOCUS.

Calls happen at times that are friendly for both Americas/EMEA and Asia-Pacific.

Steps to Get Started with FOCUS Adoption

We recommend that Practitioners and vendors begin adoption now. Just like implementing the practice of FinOps, adopting FOCUS is best done with an iterative approach. Begin utilizing FOCUS terminology to clarify reporting, and to establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Get Started: Practitioners

For FinOps Practitioners, adopting FOCUS means using FOCUS-formatted data to perform FinOps analysis and to report to leadership.

Practitioners should take these steps to get started using FOCUS data:

1. Download FOCUS Datasets – FinOps Practitioners can get your own FOCUS-formatted cost and usage data directly from all major IaaS providers. Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Amazon Web Services (AWS) all offer FOCUS-formatted cost and usage billing data exports from their consoles.

2. Get familiar with FOCUS Columns and related SQL Queries – To help Practitioners realize business value with FOCUS data, FinOps Practitioners built a library of 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.

3. Talk with your vendors about adoption – FinOps Practitioners should introduce the Specification to their preferred IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, and other vendors who generate cost and usage billing files to encourage them to adopt FOCUS.

4. Take FOCUS training – The FinOps Foundation offers two FOCUS courses. The introductory course is free and recommended for people who work with FinOps Practitioners. The certification course is a deeper-dive for those who need to get answers out of FOCUS data.

FREE Introduction to FOCUS

This course covers the goals of FOCUS, sample use cases, and how to gather FOCUS-formatted datasets.

Who is it for? People who consume FinOps reports or look at cloud billing data:

Core Personas: Leadership, Finance, Procurement, Product, Engineering
Allied Personas
People who build, market, or sell FinOps tools
Industry Analysts

FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst

This course provides an in-depth understanding of FOCUS datasets. You will learn how to use FOCUS-formatted datasets and convert non-conformant data into the FOCUS format, and leverage the FOCUS Use Case Library to answer real-world business questions with FOCUS datasets.

Who is it for? People who generate, ingest, or analyze cloud billing data:

FinOps Practitioners
People who build commercial cloud software

Get Started: Vendors

Vendors who generate cost and usage billing data – Cloud Service Providers, SaaS vendors, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), FinOps tool vendors, and FinOps service providers – can all adopt FOCUS.

For vendors, adopting FOCUS means:

Ingesting FOCUS-formatted datasets
Using FOCUS terms and concepts in your platform’s user interface and reports
Delivering FOCUS-formatted billing data as an output to your customers
Demonstrating features and functionality that solve FinOps Use Cases
Providing clear and transparent documentation of data content and any FOCUS conformance gaps

Vendors should take these steps to get familiar with the requirements of the FOCUS Specification and plan adoption:

1. Take FOCUS training. Encourage sales and marketing teams to take the Introduction to FOCUS course and register product and engineering teams for the FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst course.

2. Get familiar with the FOCUS Specification. Product and development teams should review the Specification and familiarize themselves with the requirements.

3. Build a roadmap. Discuss requirements with your product and development teams and establish a roadmap to align your offerings with FOCUS.

If you have any questions, please reach out to us at focus@finops.org.

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FOCUS 1.1 Now Available. Adoption Continues for Practitioners and Vendors.

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