- FOCUS is a free, open specification from the FinOps Foundation that gives every cloud’s billing data the same column names and format.
- The problem it solves: comparing apples to apples across AWS, Azure, GCP, SaaS, and other providers — which you currently can’t, because each vendor uses its own taxonomy.
- It’s on its way to becoming the industry standard. The sooner you normalise onto FOCUS, the less rework you pay later.
The problem, in one sentence
FOCUS sounds like an acronym designed to make your eyes glaze over. So before defining it, here’s the problem it solves:
When you pay bills from AWS, Azure, and GCP, you cannot easily compare them — because each vendor names and groups things differently.
That’s it. Everything else is machinery.
Take one concrete example: commitments. AWS calls them Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. Azure calls them Reservations and Savings Plans (similar but not identical taxonomy). GCP calls them Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), and the math works differently. The concept is roughly the same — pre-commit, pay less — but the billing columns telling you what you spent on commitments are completely different shapes across the three.
Multiply that mismatch across every line on every bill: resource types, service categories, usage units, discount types, tags, regions. Each cloud uses its own words. A report that says “our total commitment spend was $X” across multiple clouds becomes a weeks-long data engineering project just to normalise the inputs.
What FOCUS actually is
FOCUS is a specification — a document that says:
“Regardless of which cloud or SaaS vendor you’re billed by, here is the common set of column names, definitions, and value formats everyone should output.”
It was built by the FinOps Foundation (open source, free to use). Cloud vendors are adopting it. AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, and an increasing number of SaaS providers all publish (or are publishing) a FOCUS-formatted version of their billing data alongside their native formats.
You don’t have to transform anything yourself. The vendor gives you their native billing export plus a FOCUS-formatted export. You choose which to read.
Before FOCUS:
┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐
│ AWS │ │ Azure │ │ GCP │
│ CUR │ │ Cost │ │ Billing │
│ │ │ Mgmt │ │ Export │
└────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘
│ │ │
│ Each with different columns, different terminology,
│ different units. You normalise yourself — or you
│ don't, and your reports lie.
▼ ▼ ▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Weeks of data engineering per report │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘
With FOCUS:
┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐
│ AWS │ │ Azure │ │ GCP │
│ FOCUS │ │ FOCUS │ │ FOCUS │
│ export │ │ export │ │ export │
└────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘
│ │ │
└───────────────┼───────────────┘
▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Unified dataset, same columns, │
│ same terminology, same units. │
│ Compare apples to apples. │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘What you can actually do with it
Normalisation sounds abstract until you see what it unlocks. A few examples from real situations I’ve come across:
A cloud engineer asks: “Across our three clouds, what are the most-used VM specs? 16 GB RAM? 32 GB? Which region? Which OS?” — In native billing formats, that question requires three separate queries with three different schemas. In FOCUS, it’s a single GROUP BY across one unified dataset.
A business owner asks: “How much exactly did my product cost last quarter, including the AWS backend, the Azure identity layer, and the GCP analytics pipeline?” — Without FOCUS, someone has to manually stitch the three bills together and translate discount types into a common unit. With FOCUS, it’s straightforward.
A FinOps team wants a shared dashboard — previously this meant buying an expensive third-party platform whose main value was normalising billing data. FOCUS pushes that normalisation upstream, which means you can build your own dashboards in PowerBI, Looker, Tableau, or a notebook, without paying a vendor for the translation layer.
In other words, FOCUS shifts where the expensive work happens. Instead of every FinOps team solving the same normalisation problem privately, the spec solves it once and everybody downstream benefits.
What it isn’t
A few things FOCUS is not, because confusion here wastes time:
- Not a tool. It’s a specification. You don’t install FOCUS. You consume FOCUS-formatted data.
- Not a replacement for your FinOps platform. If you use a commercial tool, FOCUS makes its job easier — and may eventually reduce what you need from it.
- Not mandatory. Vendors aren’t forced to publish FOCUS exports. But the trajectory of adoption makes this increasingly a matter of “when,” not “if.”
- Not a silver bullet. You still need to allocate costs, build reports, and run processes. FOCUS just gives you cleaner inputs.
How to start using it
Three steps, in order:
Read the spec. The FOCUS getting-started pages are short and well-written. You’ll pick up the column taxonomy and terminology in an hour.
Check which of your providers already publish FOCUS data. AWS, Azure, and GCP all do. Most major SaaS vendors are catching up. Enable the FOCUS-formatted exports alongside your existing billing exports.
Pick one report to rebuild on FOCUS. Don’t rewrite everything on day one. Choose one cross-cloud report — total commitment spend, total compute by instance class, total storage by tier — and rebuild it using the FOCUS dataset. See how much simpler it is. Then keep going.
If you want to go deeper, the FOCUS certification and the GitHub repository are both solid investments.
Summary
- FOCUS gives every cloud and SaaS bill the same column names and formats. That’s the whole idea.
- It removes the “different taxonomy per vendor” tax that multi-cloud FinOps has been paying for years.
- Adoption is on an upward curve. Normalise onto FOCUS now and stop solving the same translation problem over and over.
Thanks for reading. If this helped, share it. Questions or topic suggestions — send them through.