AWS: Championing FinOps Interoperability

FinOps is a discipline within Cloud Financial Management that encompasses procedures and best practices aimed at creating transparency and cost control for cloud resources in a diverse cloud landscape, maximizing the efficiency of resource utilization. FinOps has been considered its own discipline since around 2018, and since 2019, FinOps has an organizational homebase: the non-profit FinOps Foundation (F2)

At the Steering Wheel of FinOps Development: General Members and Premier Members

In 2020, F2 joined the Linux Foundation (LF) and now considers itself a project under the LF umbrella. F2 explicitly aims to make FinOps knowledge accessible and to standardize FinOps methods and best practices, providing numerous free resources and materials on its website.

F2 is primarily supported by companies operating as cloud operators or providers and by those offering consultancy in this field. Company memberships are divided into General Members and Premier Members. Premier Members, such as Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Deloitte, EY, and SoftwareOne (also part of the Governing Board), have the right to appoint a representative as a voting member of the F2 Governing Board. General Members can only send elected representatives, one per ten General Member organizations.

Notably, AWS recently joined F2 as a Premier Member too. AWS is sending John Philips, the General Manager of AWS Cost Management and Optimization, as a representative to the Governing Board. Philips oversees AWS Billing and Cost Management, including products like AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost and Usage Reports. Additionally, Rick Ochs, Product Management Leader in Cloud Optimization, and Roy Wolman, Product Management Leader in Cost Reporting and Visualization, are joining the FinOps Technical Advisory Council and the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) Steering Committee, respectively.

FOCUS: An Open Billing Standard for the Cloud

With FOCUS, the FinOps Foundation introduces an open billing standard aiming to standardize billing data and related tools and make them interoperable across the entire cloud industry. This addresses challenges in data quality, accuracy, and data transformation in data-intensive FinOps use cases, such as cloud service chargeback or financial reporting for organizational units.

One goal of FOCUS is to make billing data compatible across major cloud providers, facilitating easy data visualization through cross-tool development. The FOCUS Steering Committee includes large companies like Meta, Microsoft, Tencent, and VMware, as well as smaller players. The committee's work focuses on creating interoperability and countering vendor lock-in, ultimately fostering a fairer competitive environment among cloud providers.

Companies engage in this initiative with the motivation to create a more open and fair competitive landscape. The current FOCUS specifications are publicly accessible, both as PDFs as well as in a github repository. A command-line tool converter, currently comparing cost data from four major cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud), is also publicly available and open source. Future plans include incorporating additional data formats, facilitated by the tool's modular design. Visualizations and a more user-friendly interface are also on the to-do list. With the added resources from AWS as a new Premier Member, they may become reality a lot faster than previously expected.