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FinOps Foundation

The Linux Foundation’s community for people who manage cloud and technology spending: it publishes the FinOps Framework, trains and certifies practitioners and vendors, and funds FOCUS, the open format for billing data.

1 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux FoundationWebsite

What it is

The FinOps Foundation grew out of the quarterly customer advisory board meetings of Cloudability, a cloud cost tool, where practitioners asked for a place to compare notes without a vendor in the room. It was founded in February 2019 with early participants such as Nationwide, Spotify, Nike, MIT and Atlassian. On June 29, 2020 the Linux Foundation announced its intent to host it; the old non-profit, which had been seeking 501(c)(6) status, closed at the end of 2020. Its executive director, J.R. Storment, co-wrote O’Reilly’s Cloud FinOps with the foundation’s CTO, Mike Fuller. In October 2026 its site counted more than 120,000 community members and more than 34,000 member companies, including 97 of the Fortune 100; joining as an individual is free.

Unlike most Linux Foundation groups, it hosts almost no code. Its main products are the FinOps Framework, a body of practice that defines FinOps as “an operational framework and cultural practice which maximizes the business value of technology”, plus courses and certifications for people (FinOps Certified Practitioner and Professional, FOCUS Analyst) and for organisations (certified platforms, service providers, training partners and FOCUS-conformant data generators). Its one technical project is FOCUS, the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, a common schema for billing data that the foundation pays for and staffs but, by FOCUS’s own governance page, does not own or control: FOCUS is a separate series of the Joint Development Foundation, the LF’s home for specifications. A Governing Board of paying members, with one seat per Premier Member (47 people in October 2026, from AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Oracle to tool vendors such as Vantage, CloudZero and Infracost), sets the budget; a Technical Advisory Council advises on the Framework.

For someone choosing technology, the foundation’s name shows up in two ways. “FinOps Certified Platform” or “FOCUS Conformant” on a vendor’s page means the vendor applied, paid membership dues and passed the foundation’s review of capabilities or of a sample dataset; it is a membership programme, not an independent audit. And “supports FOCUS” on a cloud or SaaS bill means you can load its cost data into the same tables as other providers’ data without writing a converter. There are no project maturity stages.

Its projects in this catalog

FOCUSOpen sourceA Joint Development Foundation series that the FinOps Foundation funds and staffs; its Governing Board appoints the steering committeeThe FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification: one schema for billing data, so cost exports from clouds, SaaS vendors and data centres land in the same columns with the same meaning.

In depth

What the FinOps Framework contains#

The Framework is reference material, not software: it gives teams shared names for the work, and the certifications test against it. The foundation last updated it in April 2026.

Principles

6

Short rules such as “Teams need to collaborate”, “Everyone takes ownership for their technology usage” and “FinOps data should be accessible, timely, and accurate”.

Phases

3

Inform (see and allocate the spending), Optimize (use less, or pay less for what you use) and Operate (make it part of how the organisation runs), repeated as a loop.

Domains and capabilities

4 and 22

Understand Usage & Cost, Quantify Business Value, Optimize Usage & Cost and Manage the FinOps Practice, split into capabilities such as Allocation, Anomaly Management, Unit Economics, Rate Optimization and Sustainability.

Personas

11

Six core roles, FinOps practitioner, engineering, finance, leadership, procurement and product, plus allied ones such as IT asset management, security and sustainability.

Scopes

since 2025

Segments of technology spending the practice is applied to, such as public cloud, SaaS or the data centre. The March 2025 update added them when the foundation widened FinOps from cloud bills to all technology spending.

Maturity

Crawl, Walk, Run

Each capability can be done at a basic level first and grown in scale, scope and complexity, so a team need not do everything at once.

FOCUS and the Tokenomics Foundation#

FOCUS began in the foundation’s Open Billing working group. In January 2023 the work moved to a new Linux Foundation project so it could be run as a specification, with a steering committee appointed by the FinOps Foundation’s Governing Board; in October 2026 that committee had members from Adobe, IBM Cloudability, Datadog, Capital One, Walmart, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft and the foundation itself. Contributors sign the project’s own contributor licence agreement, and need not be FinOps Foundation members. Its texts are under CC BY 4.0.

On June 3, 2026 the Linux Foundation announced its intent to launch a Tokenomics Foundation for open standards on the cost of AI infrastructure, operating “in close partnership with the FinOps Foundation”. It jointly funds the extension of FOCUS to token-based pricing, alongside the FinOps Foundation and the ITAM Forum, another LF project.

Where it came from2019–2026

Cloudability’s quarterly customer advisory board meetings brought together the people who had become responsible for cloud bills at large companies. They wanted to share practices beyond any one vendor’s tool, and in February 2019 the FinOps Foundation was set up as a trade association with initial legal and administrative help. That year J.R. Storment, a Cloudability co-founder, and Mike Fuller, then a principal engineer on Atlassian’s cloud FinOps team, published Cloud FinOps with O’Reilly; a second edition followed in January 2023.

On June 29, 2020, at the Open Source Summit, the Linux Foundation announced it would host the foundation, which then had about 1,500 individual members from more than 500 companies with over $1 billion in revenue each. Storment said the move let it hand off back-office work and spend its effort on education and on open-source work it had not yet developed. A free edX course, Introduction to FinOps, followed in July 2020.

The foundation then turned to standards. Its Open Billing working group became FOCUS in January 2023; version 0.5 came out at the FinOps X conference in June 2023, a 1.0 preview in November 2023 with AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud and Oracle as contributors, and 1.0 in June 2024. In March 2025 the Framework was reworked around Scopes to cover SaaS, licensing and data centres as well as cloud, and in June 2026 the LF announced the Tokenomics Foundation to do the same for AI token spending.

Why it’s built this way

A practitioners’ community, not a vendor alliance
The foundation started from people who run cloud bills, so its core outputs are shared vocabulary, training and peer meetings. Vendors join as paying members and seek certification, but individual membership is free.
Hand the back office to the Linux Foundation
Joining the LF gave the small foundation an existing training, events and legal organisation, and a neutral home for open-source and standards work that a trade association would have had to build.
Keep the billing standard in its own legal entity
FOCUS is a Joint Development Foundation series with its own charter and IP terms, so cloud providers can commit their billing formats to it without the FinOps Foundation owning the result.
Widen FinOps beyond the cloud
Companies’ spending on SaaS, data centres, licences and AI tokens raises the same questions as cloud bills, so the 2025 Framework added Scopes and FOCUS added non-cloud data generators.

Timeline

  1. 2019

    FinOps Foundation founded in February; Cloud FinOps published by O’Reilly

  2. 2020

    Linux Foundation announces it will host the foundation, June 29

  3. 2023

    Open Billing work becomes FOCUS in January; FOCUS 0.5 in June, 1.0 preview in November

  4. 2024

    FOCUS 1.0 in June

  5. 2025

    Framework adds Scopes in March; FOCUS 1.2 in June and 1.3 in December

  6. 2026

    FOCUS 1.4 ratified June 4; LF announces the Tokenomics Foundation on June 3

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

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