The FinOps Foundation has launched FOCUS 1.3, the latest evolution of the industry-standard FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification. The update directly tackles three long-standing pain points: transparent allocation of shared container and database costs, accurate tracking of negotiated commitments, and reliable verification of billing-data freshness.
Until now, practitioners had to reverse-engineer how cloud providers split shared costs or accept black-box allocations. FOCUS 1.3 forces transparency with new columns that expose allocation methodology, enabling accurate chargebacks and platform engineering teams rely on.
Contract terms have been even harder to reconcile. The new Contract Commitment dataset separates commitments from cost rows, letting teams instantly see remaining spend commitments with a single query.
Finally, automated workflows often break when month-end data arrives incomplete. FOCUS 1.3 requires timestamping and completeness flags so practitioners know exactly when data is final.
"With over a dozen providers already supporting FOCUS and AWS announcing generally available FOCUS 1.2 support, FOCUS is hitting yet another big milestone in terms of a rapidly maturing data structure with the new 1.3 release," said J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation. "FOCUS 1.3 goes deeper to unpack shared cost allocations, enables a broader swath of providers to support the specification, adds a new contract dataset that can be permissioned separately from cost and usage data, and helps shine light on the freshness of data."
The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit trade association focused on advancing the people who manage the value of cloud and technology. It is made up of tens of thousands of FinOps practitioners, service providers and cloud technology providers including those in 93 of the Fortune 100.
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