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License Attribution / Use

This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License][cc-by]. Use or Adaption of this work requires attribution to the FinOps Foundation under the ccby4.0 license.

You are free to:�Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format�Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

Under the following terms:�Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

More details can be found at https://www.finops.org/introduction/how-to-use/

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Introduction to FinOps

finops.org

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A Linux Foundation program which operates as non-profit membership-based trade association with a mission of:

Connections & Community

Education & Certification

Best Practices�& Standards

Advancing the people who manage the value of cloud

Key Point: The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the people who manage the value of cloud through community engagement, education, best practices, and standards.

Talk Track:

The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit organization that is part of the Linux Foundation.

Our mission is to Advance the people who are managing the value of cloud. And we do that through three primary mechanisms:

Connections and Community - Events and Meetups, monthly virtual Summits, Community Calls, our Practitioner Slack channels, and of course our annual FinOps X event. We also stand up collaborative Working Groups - each with a dedicated topic to address and provide resources for.

Education & Certification - The Foundation offers a variety of individual training and certification programs to advance FinOps Practitioners’ careers and improve FinOps practices at their organisations. Courses range from beginner to advanced, and include free introductory courses. We also offer Certifications for organizations to recognize them for the value they add to the FinOps ecosystem.

Best Practices & Standards - This open-source community has developed the FinOps Framework, and libraries of resources built from collaborative insights and the distillation of best practices. We have also released the FOCUS open billing specification and continue to work on its adoption across the industry.

These tools allow you to grow and improve your FinOps practice with insights from others in the community.

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finops.org/join/

learn.finops.org/

finops.org/framework /

focus.finops.org /

finops.org

Connections & Community

Education & Certification

Best Practices & Standards

FOCUS

FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification

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June 2-5 2025, San Diego

2000+

Total Attendees

1200+

Total Organizations

120+

Total Speakers

15+

Analysts

4+

Public Clouds

50+

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Cloud is critical to every business but is a�fundamentally different consumption model...

FinOps Definition by FinOps Foundation

Decentralized

Engineers siloed from Finance (and Procurement) are empowered to commit the company to spend

Variable

Variable cloud spend replacing data center/fixed cost spend, including numerous ways to optimize rates

Scalable

Instant access to a variety of resources enables innovation but often results in overprovisioning

Cloud is critical to success by bringing ��The new cloud economy has us facing some new realities in the IT world:

Traditional procurement silos have broken down, buying is decentralized, and it’s only getting more so
Cloud adoption, once the purview of CTOs and the location of science-fair projects now represents MATERIAL and substantial costs for many companies, and it’s only growing
What you buy in the cloud is variable, it changes month to month, day to day, minute to minute. It’s not predictable, and it’s hard to forecast well using traditional methods. And with over 1M Cloud SKUs out there, it’s only getting more complex.
In a cloud world of vast supply, plentiful options and few constraints on your spending, inefficiency is inevitable. But all businesses must focus on efficiency, and need the information to create it. Further, macroeconomic pressures – elections, Brexit, and the coming economic downturn (eventually there will be one) – require even more ruthless efficiency measures.

Inefficiency becomes a target on IT’s back (very important) in a downturn.

Luckily, there’s also a new operating model for the cloud to help address these realities.

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FinOps is an operational framework�and cultural practice which

enables timely data-driven decision making

through collaboration between engineering, finance, and business teams.

maximizes the business value of cloud and technology

creates financial accountability

Framework

Official home(s) of the FinOps Definition:

https://www.finops.org/introduction/what-is-finops/

https://github.com/finopsfoundation/definition/blob/main/definition_of_finops.md

FinOps is an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of cloud and technology, enables timely data-driven decision making, and creates financial accountability through collaboration between engineering, finance. and business teams.

Areas to Highlight:

It is both an operational framework and a cultural practice. The level of collaboration between engineering and finance required to successfully use the cloud is far greater than ever required in data center IT.
Value, not cost, is of primary importance in FinOps
Decision-making must be faster than ever, continuous, and based on the analysis of vast quantities of data from multiple sources
Ultimately Financial Accountability is everyone’s responsibility, to allow organizations to plan, forecast, budget, and allocate cloud costs correctly
Everyone must be involved in creating the culture of accountability: Engineering, Finance, Product teams, Leadership, Procurement, and Allied Personas in Security, ITAM, Sustainability and operations groups

Note: Cloud FinOps as a term is not shorthand for Financial Operations, it is a portmanteau of the terms Finance and DevOps, the two key parts of the organization that must collaborate completely

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Who Does FinOps?

In the same way that everyone is responsible for security with a central team enabling best practices (at scale), many roles do FinOps with help from a central team.

“If I do my job properly I do not need to be in the room when Finance and DevOps teams meet. They are enabled by the work I have done to normalize the cloud bill, allocate and highlight key data points. When FinOps succeeds the business is using the data of FinOps to make better decisions on its own.”

Mike Fuller, CTO FinOps Foundation,�Former Head of FinOps at Atlassian

Framework

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FinOps Core & Allied Personas

Product

Engineering

Leadership

FinOps Practitioner

Finance

Procurement

ITFM/TBM

Security

ITSM/ITIL

ITAM

Sustainability

Core�Personas

Allied�Personas

Framework

The Framework Personas have been expanded and grouped into Core and Allied Personas.

CORE PERSONAS

The organizational roles for the Core Personas that are directly involved in the practice of FinOps have remained unchanged.

However, the names for the "Engineering & Operations" Persona and the "Business/Product Owner" Persona have been simplified to "Engineering" and "Product" respectively to better represent areas of FinOps activity rather than specific roles titles.

The "Executive" Persona has been renamed to "Leadership" to reflect that organizational alignment across all leadership roles is needed to overcome FinOps challenges and connect technology decisions with business outcomes.

ALLIED PERSONAS

The Framework now includes Allied Personas. Allied Personas are stakeholders with whom the Core Personas may coordinate or collaborate when practicing FinOps. Allied Personas align to the Framework Capability Intersecting Disciplines and represent the category of people that work within that discipline. Not every organization will have these Allied Personas, but for those that do, it is important to understand how the FinOps practice will interact with them to deliver value to the organization.

Sustainability Practitioner within IT and ITAM Leader/Practitioner were simplified to Sustainability and ITAM (IT Asset Management) respectively to represent these areas of FinOps activity rather than job titles. Three new Allied Personas represent each of these intersecting disciplines:

ITFM/TBM (Information Technology Financial Management / Technology Business Management)
IT Security (Information Technology Security)
ITSM / ITIL (Information Technology Service Management / Information Technology Infrastructure Library)

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Framework

FinOps Framework

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Single image from Design/Poster folder: use this for external things (e.g., in Intro to FinOps deck)

Talk Track:

The open-source FinOps Framework is built by the community, for the community. The FinOps Foundation’s Technical Advisory Council (TAC) facilitates the maintenance of the Framework and votes on updates of its definitions, guidance, and information based on collective input from FinOps practitioners.

<What it is> The FinOps Framework offers building blocks for a successful FinOps practice. It encompasses principles, personas, measures of success, maturity characteristics, and functional activities in a common language that reflect how successful practitioners drive value from technology spend.

<How to use it> The FinOps Framework is flexible and non-prescriptive. It enables Practitioners to start with their organization's greatest need, and evolve their FinOps practice in scale, scope, and maturity as business value warrants. Organizations should select the Framework Capabilities that provide them value. For some organizations, some Capabilities are not required, and not every organization should invest in every Capability.

<Where it comes from> The FinOps Framework is iteratively developed from real-world practitioner experiences. Thousands of practitioners and other industry experts continuously collaborate to share learnings through open-source best practices.

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Core Elements of the FinOps Framework

The Operating Model for FinOps

Principles

Drive our FinOps practices

Personas

Stakeholders that FinOps supports

Maturity Model

Incremental assessment criteria for understanding the state of a FinOps activity or overall practice

Domains

Fundamental business outcomes an organization should achieve

Phases

Iterative process model for exercising FinOps Capabilities

Capabilities

Activities that can be performed to achieve the desired outcomes

Scopes

Segments of technology-�related spending to which Practitioners apply FinOps concepts.

Framework

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Certification & Training

FinOps Training

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Training, Certification, and Career Development

Individual Training & Certifications

Organizational Certifications

FinOps Training

Training link: https://learn.finops.org

Certification Information Link:

https://www.finops.org/member-certifications/

FinOps Certified Platform: Technology providers that license and deliver a software product to help people successfully adopt cloud financial management practices aligned with the FinOps standards.
FinOps Certified Service Provider: FinOps experienced professional service providers that consult with enterprises about cloud financial management and help their clients with best practices.
FinOps Certified Speciality Solution: Providers that deliver solutions that contain a subset of the functionality found in the Certified Platforms which solve a specific part of a cloud cost management challenge.
FinOps Certified Training Provider: Vetted training providers who have deep experience in cloud financial management training.
FinOps Certified Enterprise: Organizations who have demonstrated their successful practice of FinOps

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COMMUNITY

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31,000+

SME Community

39,000+

Trained

150+

Corporate Members

60,000+

Participants

33,000+

LinkedIn Followers

$300bn+

Cloud Spend Represented

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Fortune 50

Community continues to scale as practice expands:

Key Point: The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the people who manage the value of cloud through community engagement, education, best practices, and standards.

Talk Track:

The FinOps Foundation is a non-profit organization that is part of the Linux Foundation.

Our mission is to Advance the people who are managing the value of cloud. And we do that through three primary mechanisms:

Connections and Community - Events and Meetups, monthly virtual Summits, Community Calls, our Practitioner Slack channels, and of course our annual FinOps X event. We also stand up collaborative Working Groups - each with a dedicated topic to address and provide resources for.

Education & Certification - The Foundation offers a variety of individual training and certification programs to advance FinOps Practitioners’ careers and improve FinOps practices at their organisations. Courses range from beginner to advanced, and include free introductory courses. We also offer Certifications for organizations to recognize them for the value they add to the FinOps ecosystem.

Best Practices & Standards - This open-source community has developed the FinOps Framework, and libraries of resources built from collaborative insights and the distillation of best practices. We have also released the FOCUS open billing specification and continue to work on its adoption across the industry.

These tools allow you to grow and improve your FinOps practice with insights from others in the community.

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FinOps Landscape

A hub for practitioners to explore tools, services, and training that help solve FinOps challenges.

Filters include:

+ Many more

finops.org/landscape

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FinOps Topics

FinOps for AI

Cloud Sustainability

FinOps Scopes

FOCUS^™

finops.org/community/topics

Topics are current themes in FinOps that inform Foundation activities and Framework improvements.

Public Sector

Value Through Optimization

FinOps is Everyone’s Job

FinOps-Aware Product Decisions

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FinOps Foundation

Foundation Perspectives
Cloud Provider Updates
Executive Stories

Insights

A publication with perspectives, ideas, and updates that shape FinOps.

finops.org/insights

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What’s New in FinOps?

Stay up to date with the latest FinOps news, resources, and events.

Foundation News
Community Events
Training Announcements
Framework Updates
FOCUS Information
CSP Releases
Tooling Provider Updates

finops.org/updates

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Find, or Promote, FinOps Jobs on Our Job Board

Search

Country

United States
Brazil
Germany
United Kingdom
India
Australia

Region

North America
Europe, Middle East & Africa
South America
Asia Pacific

Location Type

Hybrid
Remote
Office

Community

jobs.finops.org

Our jobs board is constantly being updated.

Easily searchable by criteria that will help you quickly find FinOps jobs that are relevant to you.

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FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification

focus.finops.org

Slide deck closing slide

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FOCUS: The Unifying Format for Billing Data

Billing data from vendors is generated…

…for ingestion by Practitioners…

…to achieve FinOps Domains.

…in the FOCUS format…

What is FOCUS (conceptual)

Key Point: FOCUS normalizes billing data across vendors, which reduces time and effort needed to begin FinOps analysis.

Talk Track:

FOCUS is a specification that defines how cost and usage billing data should be formatted; It tells the vendors who sell cloud products how they should format the bills that they send to their customers.

This specification is an open-source one, meaning anyone in the community can participate in building and maintaining it. And it’s free to use. It’s not sold or commercialized.

With FOCUS, FinOps Practitioners can more easily perform FinOps Capabilities that help them achieve the desired outcomes of FinOps (Domains).

Reducing the time and effort needed to normalize and analyze cloud billing data enables Practitioners to refocus that energy on iteratively improving their Capabilities to an appropriate maturity.

In simpler words, Practitioners can spend more time on FinOps, and less time on data normalization.

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What is FOCUS?

What is FOCUS (technical)

FOCUS is an open-source technical specification for cloud billing data.

In plain language, it is�the unifying format �for billing data.

FOCUS normalizes billing data across vendors, which reduces time and effort needed to begin FinOps analysis.

Example: What does “Billed Cost” mean?

Prior to FOCUS, each cloud provider had a different definition:

AWS: lineItem/NetUnblendedCost
Azure: CostInBillingCurrency (from Actual dataset)
GCP: cost + credits.amount
OCI: cost/myCostOverage

Key Point: FOCUS normalizes billing data across vendors, which reduces time and effort needed to begin FinOps analysis.

Talk Track: What problem does FOCUS solve?

Without FOCUS, each vendor generates a unique billing data file to send to their customers, and each file has its own terminology and definitions. FOCUS provides a common language for everyone to use.

The idea here is that all vendors use these same columns and formats for data. So practitioners don’t have to spend time figuring out what “Billed Cost” means on each invoice. They won’t have to worry about, for example, whether one vendor includes amortized costs or discounts and the other doesn’t. Everyone will use the same terms and they will all mean the same thing.

This means practitioners can spend less time on data normalization, and more time finding valuable business insights.

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How does FOCUS help?

FOCUS normalizes billing data, which reduces time and effort to start FinOps analysis.

How FOCUS helps

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Cloud Adoption

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Vendor Adoption

FinOps Vendors

Cloud Vendors

Vendor Adoption

SaaS Vendors

Updated March 2025

Logo lists are not exhaustive

focus.finops.org/adoption

Coming Soon!

Version 1.2 of FOCUS �– coming in June 2025 – �will map SaaS concepts to new and existing FOCUS columns.

Encourage your SaaS vendors to adopt FOCUS!

Key Point: Show the vendor adoption landscape.

**********

Cloud Vendors

The largest Cloud Service Providers are now generating cost and usage billing data in the FOCUS format. Practitioners can visit the FOCUS website for instructions on how to download your own FOCUS billing data directly from CSPs..

FinOps Vendors

As of Feb 2025, at least 22 FinOps vendors have begun adopting FOCUS. Currently, the majority of these tools have the ability to ingest FOCUS-formatted data into their platform.

Some also offer additional support, such as the ability to generate reports using FOCUS terminology.

You can read about what each FinOps vendor offers at focus.finops.org/adoption/finops-vendors

SaaS Vendors

SaaS vendors are also just beginning to generate FOCUS billing data for their customers.

Version 1.2 of FOCUS – coming in June 2025 – will introduce new columns that are specific to SaaS needs.

Reach out to your SaaS vendors and encourage them to start planning FOCUS adoption.

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finops.org