FinOps is big money. In the current period of increased focus and concern over cloud cost management, Vantage has launched support for what it defines as ‘custom providers’ i.e. cloud service providers (typically outside of the big three hyperscalers) that do not expose their billing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Although not a global regulatory standard, billing APIs are widely used as an accepted method… but, some third-party cloud resources and data services may not offer this function. Vantage wants enterprises to be able to integrate all that information into its cloud cost management platform.
In reality, businesses today consume software from dozens of vendors, beyond just the primary cloud providers. However, says Vantage, many of these vendors offer limited, non-standardised, or even non-existent billing APIs and usage reports. The concept here is that cloud-consuming enterprises will be able to achieve a standardised single source of truth to manage cloud costs.
Beyond AWS, Azure & Google Cloud
“Organisations are increasingly using more third-party services to run their business beyond AWS, Azure and Google Cloud,” said Ben Scahechter, co-founder and CEO of Vantage. “While Vantage natively supports 15 providers, including services like Datadog and Snowflake, there are still a variety of costs from other providers that companies need to manage. This has created serious headaches for both finance teams and engineers, who are often forced to cobble together their own tools or attempt to manage costs across a complex array of spreadsheets.”
Many finance teams are forced to rely on custom tracking mechanisms or other tools that are (arguably) less well-equipped for tracking and allocating spending. Vantage says its custom providers function utilises the FinOps Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) format, an open-source specification that is rapidly gaining momentum as the standard format for usage reports.
Amortisation & allocation
Customers can import costs by uploading a CSV file, either via the Vantage platform or via the Vantage API. This includes both one-time costs, such as licenses, for amortisation and allocation purposes, or usage reports, to track ongoing spend.
“We’ve faced challenges getting insights from invoices on certain cloud providers due to API limitations or the way we’re billed. This has made it difficult for us to allocate costs accurately across all of our different products, teams, and users,” said Warrick St. Jean, senior director, solution architecture & digital transformation at PBS. “Vantage’s Custom Providers feature will allow us to upload costs from any provider, so that we can centralize visibility alongside other services like AWS while gaining deeper insights into resources by team or departments. This will make it easier to manage chargebacks and allocate resources more efficiently across PBS.”
Schaechter says that he hopes that as more vendors embrace the FOCUS schema, businesses will be able to more easily advance their FinOps practice and achieve greater control over their full cloud stack.
What is FinOps FOCUS?
Created by the Linux Foundation, FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) Version 1.0 to create a uniform format for cloud bills across different cloud providers. It is an open source specification for consistent cost and usage datasets to reduce complexity for FinOps practitioners and support data-driven decision-making. The foundation says that FinOps Practitioners face a daunting challenge: collecting, normalising, and analysing disparate cloud billing data to deliver insightful reports and recommendations that drive more business value from cloud investments. Each time a new vendor is added to the cloud ecosystem, a new schema must be developed to transform that cost and usage data into the organisation’s proprietary format. This complexity compromises a Practitioner’s ability to deliver valuable insights.
FOCUS reduces the amount of work needed to begin FinOps analysis, it converts cloud billing data from numerous sources into a single format that Practitioners, tooling vendors, and service providers use to achieve FinOps Domains.
(TOP Free Image Credit: Wim van ‘t Einde)