Cloud Giants Collaborate to Bring Transparency to Cloud Spending

As businesses transition to the cloud, tracking their spending has become more challenging. Each SaaS provider and cloud platform has its own way of reporting spending, making it difficult to consolidate and understand. The FinOps Foundation is working to address this issue with their new project, the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS). This initiative includes various companies, even competitors, such as AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle Cloud, IBM, Meta, VMware, Walmart, Capital One, Atlassian, Twilio, Datadog, and Snowflake, who are collaborating to create a unified system for cloud billing data.

CTO Mike Fuller explained that FOCUS aims to create an open-source, vendor-agnostic specification to standardize cloud billing data. The goal is to improve data reliability and make cloud spend easier to understand. The specification is designed to normalize cost and usage data between SaaS and cloud providers, with plans to offer real world use cases in the future. According to Forrester analyst Lee Sustar, FOCUS has gained support from major organizations and is gaining momentum as an initiative to simplify complex cloud bills.