What is FOCUS?

What is FOCUS?

The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS™) is an open-source specification that defines clear requirements for cloud vendors to produce consistent cost and usage datasets.

FOCUS started with cloud cost and usage data from AWS, Azure, GCP, and others with its 1.0 and 1.1 version, but with version 1.2 (coming June 2025) FOCUS is expanding into SAAS (Software as a Service). I expect FOCUS will continue to grow further and simply be the unifying format for billing data.

Artifacts

Why FOCUS?

Adopting FOCUS™, the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification

Paraphrased list of benefits from fellow practitioners / consumers / users of FOCUS:

  • Removes miscommunication due to common language for cost and usage data.
  • 1 standardized and normalized data format for all cost and usage data from cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, Tencent) and SAAS/others (in the future)
  • Removes the need to transform different cost and usage datasets, because there is only 1: 1 ETL process or, perhaps, none; you are then able to quickly analyze the data.
  • Enables ease of sharing use cases within the community with pre-defined queries.
  • Reduced complexity compared to native cloud provider billing data.
  • Easier to manage RI/SP utilization and waste allocation.

How to help build and contribute to FOCUS?

FOCUS is governed through a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) with the Linux Foundation. This means that you have to sign an agremeent in order to contribute to FOCUS. For more information checkout the Support & Feedback page which points you to the EasyCLA process.

A successful contributor will commit ~2-3 hours a week on FOCUS. A successful maintainer will commit significantly more.

You must sign the CLA before you can comment, submit pull requests, add to work items, etc. on github.

slack

Join the FinOps Foundation Community and then you can chat with FOCUS maintainers, contributors, and interested folks via the #chat-focus channel.

github

The FOCUS specification is maintained on github.

Feature requests and other items can be added via the Issues page.

Active release work items can be viewed within projects and active pull requests are also available.

How to download, modify, contribute, etc. the FOCUS specification?

There are many ways to contribute and these instructions will explain an easy way to jump in.

Prerequisites

Steps

  1. In order to sign the CLA your github account must be tied to your company/organization. Follow the instructions to create a github account or use a pre-existing one. I strongly recommend you configure MFA on your github account to secure it.

  2. Follow the instructions to install and setup Visual Studio Code. a. If you have not used Visual Studio Code before I recommend you look at the tutorial b. There are a ton of extensions that can add more capabilities to Visual Studio Code: check them out after you have gained some experience.

  3. Follow the instructions to install and setup Github desktop.

  4. Next, copy the FOCUS repository URL below as you will need this in the next step: https://github.com/FinOps-Open-Cost-and-Usage-Spec/FOCUS_Spec

  5. Follow the instructions and clone the FOCUS repository to your local computer.

  6. Open the repository folder on your local computer: either click the button to Open in Visual Studio Code or go to the Repository menu and select Open in Visual Studio Code

  7. Browse the content of the repository. a. The FOCUS columns are found under specification/columns folder b. Additional details and examples are under supporting_content/columns folder c. Check out other folders and files for

  8. Once you have completed the CLA you can collaborate a. submit issues (work items, feedback, other) b. submit a pull request c. comment on items, etc.

  9. How to create a pull request

How to submit a request if not a CLA contributor?

FOCUS support requests can be submitted here or via slack at the #chat-focus channel.

Training

As of February 2025, there are 2 FinOps Foundation learning modules to train on FOCUS: