Hidden costs hurt. From the local store to the supermarket to online sales, any use of so-called stealth pricing or inflation where costs are in some way hidden or obfuscated generally represents a bad deal for customers. In a world where hotels charge resort fees for the use of the pool, gym and Wi-Fi, restaurant-goers have even reported seeing additional charges on their checks such as “brand fees” to support development, or “backs”… the latter being levied if they have opted to sit on seats rather than the cheaper stool option.
Costing out cloud computing was supposed to be so much simpler, clean and clearer – except it hasn’t always been so. That’s disappointing. Cloud’s central promise was the ability to move away from burdensome capital expenditure outlays on IT equipment and embrace the freedom of cloud with its liberation to operational expenditure simplicity. But cloud contracts are oversold, cloud procurement is often overprovisioned… and cloud has never quite been as elastic as the brand promised.
The FinOps Foundation wants to change that.
This part of The Linux Foundation’s non-profit technology consortium is focused on advancing the practice of FinOps, the alignment of software-based financial management tools so that they straddle IT operations in a way that supports more cost-effective deployments.
This month sees the foundation lay down the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) Version 1.0 to create a uniform format for cloud bills across different cloud providers. Hoped to reduce complexity for FinOps practitioners and ease adoption of cloud infrastructure and software, cloud providers including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), and Oracle Cloud, have all formally contributed to the development of Version 1.0. This specification also has a steering committee with all voting members from the cloud providers.
The specification’s 1.0 release is ready for general adoption having passed through a rigorous approval and IP review process. The foundation says it expects to see rapidly improving data exports (a term defined by AWS as a billing and cost management feature that enables customers to create exports of their billing and cost management data using [database management] column selections and row filters to select the data they want to receive)from cloud billing generators.
“Google has more than 20 years of consuming, creating, and contributing to open source projects, it is a key part of our DNA. The FOCUS open billing data project naturally extends our commitment towards being the most open cloud provider. We want our customers to easily understand their cloud costs so that they spend more time innovating and creating business value — and we believe with FOCUS we are taking steps towards this reality”, said Pravir Gupta, VP of Google Cloud.
Gupta’s comments exactly reflect the sentiment also expressed by Fred Delombaerde, VP of commerce platform & marketplace at Microsoft. Equally upbeat is James Greenfield, VP for commerce platform at AWS who says that his team is excited to be part of an effort to make it easier for customers to use cloud financial data to get a better understanding of their cloud investments.
We’ve Only Just Begun
The FOCUS specification is said to be just getting started. As the use case library expands, FOCUS contributors, maintainers and steering committee members are already working on the 1.1 release and planning for the 1.2 release. Future developments are expected to support FOCUS data ingestion and reporting, to help adopt FOCUS terminology across platforms and to help align billing data outputs to the requirements in the specification.
Version 1.0 includes common taxonomy, terminology and metrics for billing datasets. FOCUS will also be extensible to other cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) billing datasets, including networking, observability and security tools. Future updates are expected to add further support for SaaS providers and on-premises datasets.
“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 it also sets you up for tomorrow’s opportunities,” said Mike Fuller, CTO at the FinOps Foundation. “We’ve moved beyond the initial building phase for FOCUS and into the phase where practitioners can use these datasets to perform multi-cloud discount analysis, optimize resource usage, and allocate shared costs. FOCUS makes it easier for organizations to increase value from their cloud investments.”
Fuller explains that FOCUS was built by establishing a a library of over forty common FinOps use cases, each complete with an SQL query that uses FOCUS columns to answer business questions. These use cases offer a standardized approach to extracting answers from billing data, and give practitioners time back to work on higher-priority FinOps capabilities.
“To get to the set of columns that makes FOCUS work, thousands of hours of discussion and reviews occurred in an operational structure that allows community inputs, and contains a set of IP protections processes to protect adopters from patent infringement concerns. Getting to consensus on a specification takes time, and deep discussion with product experts from the entire environment of cloud. Some conversations around simple labels and column descriptions are the culminations of hundreds of hours of conversations with dozens of contributors,” notes the FinOps Foundation, in a technical statement.
Let’s Go (Cloud) Shopping
As this and the wider FinOps movement evolves, this story will not just be one of costs, procurement and financial management; the FinOps dream is also very much one where we get to a much better stance in multi-cloud management.
You want your multi-cloud concoction this way, with extra this and that, but with a scaled-down something else so that it is compartmentalized into a more custom-tuned format with a more accurately ascribed cost? No problem, have it your way… or that’s where we hope to get to at least. Tracy Woo, Forrester principal analyst called that process the “advancement to billing disintermediation” from any specific cloud vendor environment… and she’s right.
“This is a big deal,” said Woo. “[The] FOCUS 1.0 specification is the first step in a long journey towards the abstractable, composable cloud. It removes the burden of the multi-skill set knowledge required to manage costs across all of the tools and clouds organizations use to manage and support their IT environment. In doing so, organizations can more easily optimize their cloud investments and drive sustainable financial growth.”
Cloud may get easier to cost. If we can make it easier and less complex to use at the engineering backend at the same time, then we will all be happy. Ker-ching, next customer please.
