The FinOps Foundation has announced the latest version of the FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification (FOCUS), aiming to solve problems related to splitting shared resource costs, tracking contract commitments accurately, and verifying data freshness.
FOCUS 1.3 adds new allocation-specific columns to enable teams to expose how they are splitting costs of shared resources, such as Kubernetes pods or database instances.”Some data generators give you the opportunity to split the cost of service services/resources, but that capability and rationale for how a resource was split wasn’t available in FOCUS,” the release notes state.
The latest version of the specification also adds a Contract Commitment dataset that isolates contract terms from cost and usage rows. According to the FinOps Foundation, contractual commitments that were only described within service provider contracts were hard to connect back to data in cost and usage datasets, making it hard for teams to understand how much of their cost and usage is related to third-party providers.
Another update is that there is now a clear distinction between a provider that makes a resource or service available for purchase and a provider that owns the infrastructure that resource or service is deployed on. The organization believes this will make it easier for practitioners to understand who to contact for support and billing inquiries.
Finally, version 1.3 introduces a requirement for providers to timestamp their datasets and flag their completeness status, so that data practitioners understand if data is final and avoid processing incomplete data.
Now that FOCUS 1.3 is complete, the maintainers of the specifications are working on version 1.4, which will include features like a FOCUS Invoice Dataset, expanded Contract Commitment dimensions, and non-functional requirements to improve provider consistency.
