FinOps Foundation releases FOCUS 1.3 to address cloud cost management data gaps.
A cloud challenge that hampers many organizations is how to normalize billing data across disparate platforms that include multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure deployments. Enterprises are spending significant resources building custom integrations to reconcile cost data from different cloud providers, SaaS platforms and on-premises infrastructure.
That’s the domain of FinOps, a practice that has gained traction in recent years. FinOps combines finance, operations and engineering teams to manage cloud and technology spending. Among the leading organizations in the movement is the FinOps Foundation, which is part of the Linux Foundation project.
The FinOps Foundation is responsible for the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS), which was first released in 2023. The primary goal of FOCUS is to help standardize how providers format billing data, so organizations can compare costs across multiple platforms without building custom integrations for each one. More than a dozen providers now support FOCUS, including major cloud vendors (Google, Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent) and platform providers (Databricks, Grafana). The specification has evolved beyond its original cloud-only focus to encompass SaaS, data center and emerging AI infrastructure spending.
This week, the FinOps Foundation announced the release of the FOCUS 1.3 specification. The update aims to address three persistent technical challenges:
- Splitting shared resource costs with transparent allocation methodology
- Tracking contract commitments in a structured format
- Verifying data freshness and completeness through standardized metadata
“FOCUS is really meant to be a language of cloud and technology value,” J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation, told Network World.
From cloud-only to hybrid infrastructure management
The FinOps practice has undergone significant expansion since the FOCUS specification first launched in 2023. What began as a cloud cost management discipline has evolved into a comprehensive approach for managing technology value across diverse infrastructure types.
“The big change that’s really started to happen in late 2024 early 2025 is that the FinOps practice started to expand past the cloud,” Storment said. “A lot of organizations got really good at using FinOps to manage the value of cloud, and then their organizations went, ‘oh, hey, we’re living in this happily hybrid state now where we’ve got cloud, SaaS, data center. Can you also apply the FinOps practice to our SaaS? Or can you apply it to our Snowflake? Can you apply it to our data center?'”
The FinOps Foundation’s community has grown to approximately 100,000 practitioners. The organization now includes major cloud vendors, hardware providers like Nvidia and AMD, data center operators and data cloud platforms like Snowflake and Databricks. Some 96 of the Fortune 100 now participate in FinOps Foundation programs.
The practice itself has shifted in two directions. It has moved left into earlier architectural and design processes, becoming more proactive rather than reactive. It has also moved up organizationally, from director-level cloud management roles to SVP and COO positions managing converged technology portfolios spanning multiple infrastructure types.
This expansion has driven the evolution of FOCUS beyond its original cloud billing focus. Enterprises are implementing FOCUS as an internal standard for chargeback reporting even when their providers don’t generate native FOCUS data. Some newer cloud providers, particularly those focused on AI infrastructure, are using the FOCUS specification to define their billing data structures from the ground up rather than retrofitting existing systems.
The FOCUS 1.3 release reflects this maturation, addressing technical gaps that have emerged as organizations apply cost management practices across increasingly complex hybrid environments.
FOCUS 1.3 exposes cost allocation logic for shared infrastructure
The most significant technical enhancement in FOCUS 1.3 addresses a gap in how shared infrastructure costs are allocated and reported. Current implementations force practitioners to either accept provider-determined allocations without visibility into methodology or build custom logic to redistribute costs.
FOCUS 1.3 introduces allocation-specific columns that expose the methodology providers use to split costs across workloads. Rather than simply receiving a final allocated cost figure, practitioners can now see both the allocation approach and the underlying calculation method.
This change particularly benefits organizations running multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters or shared database instances. Platform engineering teams can verify that provider allocation methods align with their internal cost models and chargeback systems.
The specification provides a standardized way for providers to document whether they’re using resource-based allocation, usage-based allocation or hybrid approaches.
Separating contract data from usage records
Organizations tracking reserved instances, savings plans and committed use discounts across multiple cloud providers face a data structure problem. Current billing exports embed contract details within usage rows. A single cost record might include both the hourly usage charge and fragments of commitment information scattered across multiple columns.
This structure makes basic queries difficult. Asking “what are all my active commitments, and when do they expire?” requires parsing usage data, deduplicating contract references and reconstructing commitment terms from partial information across thousands of billing rows.
FOCUS 1.3 creates a dedicated Contract Commitment dataset separate from cost and usage data. The dataset includes start dates, end dates, committed units and contract descriptions in a queryable format. A single SELECT statement returns all active commitments without touching usage records.
The separation enables different access controls. Finance teams can view contract terms and commitment status while operations teams access only the usage data they need for capacity planning. This addresses compliance requirements in financial services and healthcare where contract terms must be restricted to specific roles.
“We didn’t have the opportunity for them to express that through the FOCUS metadata before, and so we wanted to be able to close that gap for providers that support it,” Matt Cowsert, principal product manager at the FinOps Foundation, told Network World.
This represents the first time FOCUS has defined a dataset beyond cost and usage. The pattern establishes a framework for future adjacent datasets covering invoicing and price lists.
Flagging incomplete data before it breaks workflows
Automated cost reconciliation workflows fail when they process incomplete billing data. A common scenario: Finance triggers month-end close based on available data, then discovers two days later that the cloud provider revised usage records and added previously unreported charges.
FOCUS 1.3 requires providers to include metadata indicating whether data is complete or subject to revision. The specification defines timestamp fields and completeness flags in a structured format that applications can check programmatically.
Organizations can now build logic that checks completeness status before triggering dependent processes. If the metadata indicates incomplete data, automated workflows can wait rather than processing partial information and requiring manual corrections later.
The metadata also documents data delivery SLAs. Providers specify when usage records for specific services have been finalized. This replaces informal knowledge about which providers deliver complete data within 24 hours versus which take three to five days to finalize records.
FOCUS in the real world
The FinOps Foundation releases FOCUS updates twice annually. Providers choose implementation timing based on their development cycles rather than following a lockstep upgrade path.
Enterprises are also implementing FOCUS as an internal standard independent of external provider support. Organizations use FOCUS language for internal chargeback systems and finance reporting even when aggregating data from providers that don’t generate native FOCUS output.
“Our goal is to ensure that each release for FOCUS has material benefit for practitioners,” Cowsert said.
