AWS re:Invent 2025 - Advanced multicloud cost reporting with FOCUS (COP419)

Advanced Multicloud Cost Reporting with FOCUS

Understanding the Challenges of Multicloud Cost Management

• Many organizations struggle with collecting, normalizing, and analyzing cost and usage data across multiple cloud providers and SaaS platforms
• Common challenges include:
  • Collecting data from different sources
  • Normalizing data formats and metrics
  • Deriving insights from the data
  • Visualizing the data for reporting

Introducing FOCUS: The Finops Open Cost and Usage Specification

• FOCUS is an open specification created by the Finops Foundation to provide a consistent way to represent cost and usage data across providers
• FOCUS 1.0 was launched last year, and FOCUS 1.2 was recently released with additional capabilities
• Key features of FOCUS:
  • Standardized columns and metrics for cost, usage, and pricing data
  • Support for data from cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and on-premises data centers
  • Enables a universal view of an organization's technology stack costs

Integrating FOCUS Data into Your Analytics Pipeline

1. Data Ingestion: Collect FOCUS data from cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and on-premises sources
2. Data Transformation: Use tools like AWS Glue to catalog and transform the FOCUS data
3. Data Analysis: Query the FOCUS data using tools like Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift
4. Data Visualization: Visualize the FOCUS data using dashboards and reports in tools like Amazon QuickSight or Grafana

Deriving Insights from FOCUS Data

• FOCUS provides four standardized cost columns:
  • Billed Cost: The actual amount billed on the invoice
  • List Cost: The on-demand cost without any discounts or commitments
  • Contracted Cost: The cost with discounts, but without commitment purchases
  • Effective Cost: The amortized cost, considering all discounts and commitment purchases
• These cost columns can be used to:
  • Reconcile invoices and understand actual spend
  • Estimate costs without discounts or commitments
  • Calculate savings from discounts and commitment purchases

Analyzing Multicloud and Multiservice Workload Distributions

• FOCUS data includes tags and metadata that can be used to track workload distribution across accounts, providers, and environments
• Example use case: Determining where a specific application (e.g., "FU") is running, and the cost distribution across accounts and providers
• Techniques demonstrated:
  • Using JSON extraction and regular expressions to parse tag data
  • Leveraging window functions to calculate cost percentages by account and provider
  • Filtering and aggregating the data to identify split workloads

Visualizing FOCUS Data

• The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards provide an out-of-the-box solution for visualizing FOCUS data
• Includes a consolidated view that integrates data from multiple cloud providers and SaaS platforms
• Supports FOCUS 1.0 and plans to add support for FOCUS 1.2 soon

Key Takeaways

• FOCUS provides a standardized way to represent cost and usage data across multiple cloud providers and SaaS platforms
• Integrating FOCUS data into your analytics pipeline can help overcome the challenges of multicloud cost management
• FOCUS data can be used to derive insights about actual spend, potential savings, and workload distribution
• Visualization tools like the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards can help make the FOCUS data actionable and easy to interpret