Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 is now in general availability

Today AWS announced the general availability release of Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0. You can now create exports of your AWS cost and usage data with the FOCUS 1.0 schema with significant specification conformance improvements compared to the public preview released in June 2024. FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Standard), supported by the FinOps Foundation, is an open-source cloud cost and usage specification that provides standardization to normalize cost and usage data and simplify cloud financial management across multiple sources. With Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0, you can easily aggregate, query, and analyze cost and usage data from various sources.

In this blog post, we discuss the benefits of Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0, the differences between the GA and preview releases, the differences between Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 and CUR 2.0 and how to choose between these two, and lastly, our commitment to continuing to support the FOCUS project.

Why you should use Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0?

The differences in billing and usage data format and terminologies used by each provider adds complexity to your cost reporting process, as you normalize and analyze data across sources. How you interpret cost, discounts, purchase options across sources determines whether you can fairly evaluate ROI on providers as well as discover savings opportunities.

AWS Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 conforms to the cost and usage specifications, and provides you with the following benefits:

• Standardized cost columns: With FOCUS 1.0, you will see your costs in standardized columns, such as ListCost, BilledCost, and EffectiveCost. It ensures each type of billing data appears in a consistent column that can be reliably referenced within or across sources. You can validate your discounts with a single calculation (e.g. EffectiveCost/ListCost).
• Consistent schema for all columns: FOCUS 1.0 uses a standardized schema, so each type of billing data (cost or non-cost related) appears in the same column across sources. Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 also includes 5 AWS-specific columns for proprietary billing data, such as AWS usage types and cost categories.
• Common set of values: FOCUS 1.0 uses a common set of values for fields, such as service category and usage quantity. For example, it only allows the value “Hours” to describe a line item that is charged by the hour, without variations of “hr”, “hrs”. Therefore, mappings or conversions aren’t required for aggregations on certain columns.

What is the difference between Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 (GA) and Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 (preview)?

The GA release of FOCUS 1.0 is available as a new table in Data Exports, in addition to Cost and Usage Report (CUR) 2.0 and Cost Optimization Hub recommendations. See the screenshot below. Any existing FOCUS 1.0 preview exports you may have will continue to operate normally, so you can explore the differences between the GA and preview data to prepare to switch over any dashboards or analysis tools to the GA data. If you are creating a FOCUS 1.0 export for the first time, you should only use a GA export. With the improvements listed below in the GA release, you can use FOCUS 1.0 exports from AWS for production FinOps use cases, such as providing cost dashboards to your FinOps analyst teams or performing internal cost allocations.

Figure 1. Screenshot of Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 in the Billing and Cost Management Console

In the GA release, 11 key specification conformance gaps have been resolved with 8 gaps remaining, compared to 19 gaps in the preview table. Most of the 8 gaps in our GA release are due to missing non-cost related values, such as a missing SkuId or PricingUnit, for a subset of your line items. These instances of missing values are consistent with the data in the CUR and CUR 2.0 today. If you weren’t missing those values in CUR and CUR 2.0, you likely won’t be affected by these in Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0. We will be investigating solving these last 8 conformance gaps in future FOCUS 1.0 exports. For a summary of what conformance gaps are in the FOCUS 1.0 GA release, please read the user guide
FOCUS 1.0 with AWS columns conformance gaps. You can also compare this to the list of conformance gaps that are present in the preview release.

“We’re excited to see cloud providers like AWS continue to invest in helping their customers receive the benefits of the FOCUS specification. This release brings their FOCUS support out of ‘preview’ unlocking the ability for more customers to use it in production. The additional work that AWS has done in the last few months to align their Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 has enabled their customers to gain more insights from their billing data and ultimately drive more value from their cloud. With the billing data standardization that FOCUS brings,  customers can spend less time managing data pipelines, more quickly understand their data and focus more on generating useful insights and outcomes.”

— J.R. Storment, Executive Director, FinOps Foundation

How do you choose between FOCUS 1.0 and CUR 2.0 for your Cloud Financial Management practices?

CUR 2.0 is recommended when you want the most detailed cost and usage data from AWS and is recommended when you want to perform the most complex cloud financial management tasks. For example, with CUR 2.0, you can opt in to receive Split Cost Allocation Data for a detailed breakdown of your Amazon ECS and EKS container costs. Split Cost Allocation Data is currently not supported by the FOCUS 1.0 specification.

The FOCUS 1.0 with AWS columns (GA) export is recommended when you are looking for standardization of cost and usage data across multiple cloud or software vendors. Its standardized set of columns and values makes it easy to combine cost and usage data from multiple providers without having to perform data normalization. While FOCUS 1.0 doesn’t have as much detail as the CUR 2.0, it still has enough to perform many key cloud financial management tasks. The specification is also being enhanced in new releases by the open-source community in order to support more tasks.

How is AWS involved in the FOCUS project?

AWS joined the FinOps Foundation and FOCUS open-source project in October 2023. Leaders of AWS cost reporting product team took positions on both the steering committee and FOCUS maintainer group. The steering committee is responsible for providing strategic guidance and approval of the specification, while the maintainers are responsible for leading development of the specification with all FOCUS contributors. Development of the FOCUS specification is managed via its public GitHub repository.

As a steering committee member, AWS approved the FOCUS 1.0 and 1.1 releases. As a maintainer, we contributed content and content reviews to the GA specification releases for both FOCUS 1.0 and 1.1. We will continue to represent the needs of AWS customers in both the steering committee and maintainer group for the FOCUS 1.2 release currently being planned, and future releases to come.

How can you get started with Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0?

You can get started by visiting the Data Exports page in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console and creating an export of the new GA table named “FOCUS 1.0 with AWS columns”. After creating a FOCUS 1.0 GA export, you will no longer need your preview export. Alternatively, you can use the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID) template for Data Exports to create an export of FOCUS 1.0 and automatically set up Athena with Glue for running SQL queries on your data. If you want to get started quickly with data visualizations , you can also choose to deploy a FOCUS 1.0 dashboard from CID.