FinOps FOCUS: Insights on Cloud Cost and Data Migration

Key Points:

• With 85% of organizations using multiple cloud providers and a quarter using five or more, managing cloud costs has become increasingly complex.
• Implementing the FinOps FOCUS framework enables real-time tracking of cloud costs, with organizations achieving up to a 49% reduction in billing data needing processing.
• Leveraging the FOCUS framework, GitLab significantly improved cost allocation accuracy, increasing from 30% to 80%.

Organizations scaling their cloud environments often face challenges with cloud cost management and FinOps (the practice of managing cloud financial operations). In particular, this becomes more difficult as businesses use multiple cloud providers. A recent survey found that 85% of organizations use at least two clouds, with a quarter using five or more. Managing costs across different platforms can quickly become complex. Each provider has its billing system, terminology, and data formats, creating significant friction for cloud practitioners. Fragmentation can lead to confusion, inefficiency, and missed optimization opportunities as teams struggle to align costs with business goals. As a result, many cloud practitioners have turned to frameworks like FOCUS for a solution. So, what is FOCUS for FinOps? Finops FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) is a standardized framework simplifying cloud cost data.

Using a consistent format for cost and usage data, FOCUS helps organizations break down the barriers between cloud providers. This standardization makes integrating, comparing, and analyzing data from various sources easier, streamlining, managing, and optimizing cloud expenses. Standardized data also empowers cloud practitioners to make data-driven decisions with greater confidence, ultimately optimizing spend and improving financial visibility across the organization. As Mike Fuller, CTO at the FinOps Foundation, explains, "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 also sets you up for tomorrow's opportunities."

For example, GitLab has successfully streamlined its cloud cost management, gained deeper spending insights, and empowered teams to make more informed, cost-effective decisions by adopting FOCUS. In this article, we’ll explore how FOCUS helps organizations tackle challenges and dive deeper into GitLab’s success story to understand the real-world impact of adopting the FinOps FOCUS framework.

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How FinOps FOCUS Simplifies Cloud Cost Management

FOCUS is a comprehensive billing standard designed to bring clarity and uniformity to cloud cost data. Its primary goal is to create a standardized format for reporting and analyzing cloud expenses, making it easier for organizations to track, allocate, and optimize costs across multiple cloud platforms. By establishing a common cost and usage data structure, FOCUS enables cloud practitioners to overcome the challenges of managing diverse billing systems and data formats.

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At the heart of FOCUS is its well-defined specification, which outlines key components like cost allocation, usage metrics, resource categorization, and service-specific details. This structure includes consistent data columns and schema definitions, enabling users to track expenses across different providers easily.

“One of the things that we’ve run into is that one of the underlying core issues with working with FinOps data and trying to push forward a culture of cost accountability and getting finance integrated and getting engineers to take better actions to be more efficient from a cost standpoint is that the data underlying the practice is super confusing,” said J.R. Storment, the executive director of the FinOps Foundation. “We’re trying to solve that underlying data problem. The big challenge is people don’t trust the data, and they don’t understand it - and as a result, they can’t take actions on it.”

For instance, FOCUS standardizes terms such as “billed cost,” “effective cost,” and “amortized cost,” which provides users with a clear understanding of actual versus calculated costs. FOCUS also includes identifiers for specific SKUs, resources, and pricing models, ensuring a detailed and transparent breakdown of all cloud expenses.

By bringing a standardized structure to cloud cost data, FOCUS lets organizations manage and optimize expenses with greater precision and transparency. The FOCUS framework is tailored explicitly for three main groups: cloud vendors, FinOps practitioners, and service providers.

Here’s a closer look at how each of these groups uses FinOps FOCUS:

• Cloud Vendors: Major cloud providers and software vendors use FOCUS to format billing data to align with FinOps standards, simplifying client data integration.
• FinOps Practitioners will benefit from the unified format, enabling them to implement cost management and optimization strategies more efficiently across platforms.
• Service Providers: Those developing FinOps tools and solutions leverage FOCUS to support clients’ needs, ensuring compatibility and seamless integration into various cloud cost management workflows.

These groups contribute to a collaborative ecosystem where FOCUS fosters clarity, trust, and actionable insights toward cloud financial management. Backed by industry giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, FOCUS is poised to enhance billing transparency and significantly democratize strategic cloud cost management.

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How FinOps FOCUS Improved GitLab’s Cost Accuracy

GitLab offers a great example of FinOps FOCUS in action. As a significant DevOps platform with a cloud-agnostic approach, GitLab’s infrastructure spanned multiple providers, including Google Cloud, AWS, and Oracle. This multi-cloud setup created a complex web of cost and usage data. As Clément Leroux, Staff FinOps Engineer at GitLab, explained, “We want to be deployed on every cloud, and it makes for a more complex management of cost and usage data across different platforms. Starting from this context and this challenge, we decided we needed a cloud billing and usage SSOT—single source of truth.”

Without this unified source, GitLab struggled to allocate costs accurately, forecast budgets, and empower teams with insights into the financial impact of their engineering decisions. Each cloud provider’s unique billing structure, data format, and terminology contributed to a fragmented view of spending, making it challenging to manage costs cohesively.

To address these challenges, GitLab turned to FOCUS to standardize its cost data and unify its approach to cloud financial management. Implementing FOCUS at GitLab involved building a custom data pipeline tailored to GitLab’s unique cloud environment. The process began with integrating FOCUS-aligned data formats across all cloud providers. GitLab’s data team developed a unified pipeline within their internal data warehouse, Snowflake, transforming raw cost and usage data into the FOCUS format using DBT (data build tool). This transformation aligned cloud costs with internal finance and engineering dimensions, making generating a comprehensive view of financial data easier.

GitLab took an innovative approach to metric-based mapping, which let them match cloud costs directly with engineering usage metrics and product categories. For example, the GitLab platform itself tracks user data through Prometheus, identifying cost impacts by customer type (free, paid, or internal). This level of granularity empowered GitLab to allocate expenses with remarkable accuracy and build customized dashboards in Tableau, enabling finance and engineering teams to track usage-based costs in real time.

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The results have been transformative for GitLab. By adopting FOCUS, GitLab improved its cost allocation accuracy from 30% to an impressive 80% coverage, with the remaining costs still mapped through manual adjustments. Greater accuracy has brought newfound clarity to financial and operational planning, reducing the need for ad hoc reports and enabling more informed decision-making.

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How FinOps FOCUS Transforms Cloud Cost Management Across Teams

To get a better understanding of the potential of FinOps FOCUS, consider an organization where every team member, from engineers to finance, has real-time visibility into cloud costs. FOCUS helps them make immediate, informed decisions without waiting on data processing or technical mediation. As Amber Gregorio, Director of Product Marketing of the FinOps Foundation, explains, "Once we have that data in this normalized FOCUS format, it’s very easy for practitioners to bring that into their data pools or data lakes, or whatever FinOps tooling they may be using. FinOps service providers can easily ingest all that data from different sources into the tools they're using. The interesting - and really critical - thing for our vendors to understand is that customers are going to be looking for them to support this. They're going to want all of their tools in the ecosystem to comply with FOCUS. We saw in the State of FinOps survey that everybody’s using an average of 4.1 tools, so it’s important for all of these tools to be speaking the same language." With standardized, accessible cloud data, each team gains the tools to optimize cloud usage, align with financial goals, and even uncover new strategies for cost efficiency.

Here’s a closer look at how FinOps FOCUS creates practical benefits across teams:

• Real-Time Cost Feedback: With FOCUS, teams don’t need to wonder where resources are used or wait for monthly billing cycles to spot unexpected costs. Real-time insights let them monitor spending as it happens, so if inefficiencies or unexpected expenses arise, they can respond immediately by adjusting resource usage or switching to more cost-effective options.
• Unit Economics Insights: FOCUS breaks down costs into easy-to-understand units, such as per-feature or per-user expenses, providing a clear view of how each resource contributes to overall costs. Transparency helps teams determine which features are financially sustainable and may need reevaluation, creating a continuous improvement cycle where each dollar spent aligns with measurable outcomes.
• Engineering Team Empowerment: Engineers gain direct access to cost insights, enabling them to make decisions that add value. With FOCUS, developers can design cost-effective and high-performing solutions by choosing configurations that fit budget constraints. This access fosters a culture where engineers take ownership of financial goals and actively contribute to cost savings.
• Finance Team Self-Service Capabilities: FOCUS clarifies data for finance teams, enabling them to access, analyze, and forecast spending independently. A self-service model reduces dependency on technical teams and gives finance the confidence to track cloud budgets, analyze trends, and forecast accurately.
• Spontaneous Cost Optimizations: With insights at their fingertips, teams can adjust on the fly, right-sizing instances, scaling back resources during off-peak hours, or shifting workloads as needed. These optimizations happen naturally and frequently, fostering a proactive approach to cost management that saves money without waiting for formal reviews.
• Improved Forecasting Accuracy: With consistent data from multiple providers, FOCUS supports long-term planning by allowing finance and operations to develop accurate forecasts. Teams can track trends, identify seasonal spending patterns, and confidently plan for the future, reducing the likelihood of surprises and improving budget alignment.

Through FOCUS, cloud cost management becomes a collaborative, data-driven effort where everyone is empowered to contribute to financial goals. The result is an organization where cloud investments align seamlessly with business strategy, driving innovation and sustainable growth.

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Your Guide to Implementing FOCUS: Tools, Training, and Best Practices

If you’re interested in getting started with the FinOps FOCUS framework, here are some key resources to help you learn and become an expert on it:

• The FOCUS Column Library can be your go-to reference for standardized data columns and definitions across cloud providers.
• Explore the Use Case Library, a collection of real-world scenarios with predefined SQL queries designed to demonstrate how FOCUS datasets can be applied to everyday FinOps tasks.
• The FinOps Foundation offers two essential training courses to support your FOCUS journey: an introductory overview and the FinOps Certified FOCUS Analyst course. These courses provide a structured path for learning FOCUS's foundational principles and practical applications.

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Once you have a solid understanding of the FinOps FOCUS framework, you can implement it within your organization. Start with core billing data and take a phased approach to adoption. Begin by aligning and standardizing data with the FOCUS specification, then gradually expand to include additional clouds and datasets as your team gains familiarity with the framework.

Embracing best practices, such as involving cross-functional teams, setting up consistent workflows, and fostering a culture of cost accountability, will help ensure a successful implementation and set the stage for long-term benefits. Also, since FOCUS is a community-driven initiative, engaging with the FOCUS user community is a great way to contribute to its growth. By sharing feedback, participating in discussions, and learning from others’ experiences, you can help shape the framework better to address the evolving needs of the FinOps field.

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A Roadmap to Efficiency and Innovation with FinOps FOCUS

FinOps FOCUS can help transform cloud cost management, simplifying how organizations handle the challenges of multi-cloud environments. By standardizing cost and usage data, FOCUS gives teams real-time insights to make data-driven decisions and promotes a culture of financial responsibility. With resources like the FOCUS Column Library, FinOps Use Case Library, and specialized training courses, FinOps practitioners have the support they need to adopt FOCUS smoothly and see results. For instance, GitLab has used FOCUS to increase cost accuracy and transparency, making it easier for finance, engineering, and operations to work together to optimize cloud spending. Embracing FOCUS is a step toward greater efficiency and alignment, setting up organizations for long-term growth and innovation.