Larry Advey - Leveraging FOCUS for Stakeholder Management

Speaker A: Hi, I am Larry Advie and welcome to the world famous Finops Pod.

Speaker B: I like when we're so serious about that countdown, but don't laugh. But nothing actually happens when it gets to one.

Speaker C: What do you mean it's go time?

Speaker B: It's go time. It's not like it gets three and we start in front of a studio audience.

Speaker C: No, it's 3, 2, 1, and then it's Finop spot time.

Speaker B: Well, speaking of, hey, I'm Stacy Case.

Speaker C: And I'm Joe Daly and this is Finops Pod. Finops Pod.

Speaker B: Ooh, I'm rubbing off on you. You're starting to sing things now and make jingles and make sound effects.

Speaker C: I always talk like this.

Speaker B: Please do the rest of the introduction as if you are in a musical. Jo Daily.

Speaker C: Stacy, how are you today?

Speaker B: I take that back. Please never do that again. Jo, how are you doing?

Speaker C: It's a great day for finops. Stacey.

Speaker B: Okay, it's always a great day for finops, but yes, almost forgot about that. Okay. How are you doing, Joe?

Speaker C: It's been a minute. I'm doing good. We took January off. How was your January?

Speaker B: Busy. It's been. But really, really good. Um, it's been fun to kind of watch all the new framework 2025 things start to come into effect. We've wrapped up the state of finops, which by time this gets posted, will probably have been released to everybody. Me personally. The training team did something really cool. We were able to go deliver an in person Finops certified practitioner training to 400 people, which is insane.

Speaker A: I know.

Speaker B: It's a lot of people. M. It's a lot of people. We had Jonathan Morley, who's our education principal and he's our lead instructor for everything we do. Him and Rob Martin went. But Jonathan just was hilarious on that stage and delivering the training. And I'm so proud of everybody that participated, everybody that got certified. Because not only like 400 people attended training or about 400 people, um, just about all of them got certified within that same day. And if not that same day, that the week following. It was a really strong culture of wanting to learn finops. So that was really exciting.

Speaker C: Exciting.

Speaker B: And it's just. I gotta be in person. I gotta go to Chicago for a couple of days. So that was really neat and to talk to people that I hadn't met before. Um, it was a really exciting experience.

Speaker C: But Jonathan's great. We should get. Well, he is this year. We'll get his voice on the. On the podcast somehow.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, he's really great. And the. One of the things that I appreciate about Jonathan more than anything and anybody that's ever seen me at Finops X or any event will often see me with a Diet Coke in my hand. But when I'm anywhere with Jonathan, he will preemptively get Diet Cokes to hand to me. And I don't know if that's saying that I'm cranky without that caffeine or. Or if he's just that nice of a person. I think it's just that nice of a person that he tries to anticipate what somebody might need.

Speaker C: I think he's manipulative.

Speaker B: That he's very manipulative. Well, he's one of. He's one of my favorite team members because of it. I'm not gonna lie.

Speaker C: Bribes.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, also, hint to anybody that ever is at X or an event with me, wanna get on my good side, bring me a Diet Coke. No, I kid. I kid. I've got Jonathan for that. How was your January? How was. How's 2025 treating you and Finops?

Speaker C: Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. X planning is in full steam.

Speaker B: You know what's funny about that? Hold on. What's weird about that is we always have. Obviously, Finops X is always in June at some time, but because it's the first week of June this year, it feels like it's three months earlier.

Speaker C: It does.

Speaker B: You and Jessica more than anybody know that feeling, but, yeah, you're full on in recruitment mode to get people there, aren't you?

Speaker A: Yeah, I.

Speaker C: Absolutely, folks. Uh. And that's why when I talk to people, they're like, oh, yeah, I got time. I'm like, well, you have less time than you did last year. It is. It's the first week of June. And the other week I was like, you know, you will be boarding an airplane in four months from today. And they're like, oh. I was like, yeah, you better make the plans now, because, you know, airfare doesn't necessarily get more plentiful and cheaper the longer you wait. It's one of those things where it's, like, off to a fast start. Okay, we're starting the year. Let's get our conference tickets planned and registered. Our call for submissions just closed, and the content committee is going through. The community is just. If you submitted a talk. Thank you. Just a preemptive thank you for being willing and wanting to share your perspective and experience with everyone. Going through these is so tough because every story is good.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And just trying to find the Right. Mix and match and curate the right thing. It's going to be great. Again, uh, I'm excited to hear some of these stories and get people on stage and before you know it, we'll be back in San Diego with our gigantic finops tribe from around the globe. It's going to be exciting.

Speaker B: And you and I talked earlier too this week. We were talking about the submissions for papers and people that are submitting for breakouts and chalk talks even. And I'm just so impressed. You know, you touched on it. The amount of people that are folks that have been there before, that have presented before and there's so many people that had never even presented. And these are people that come from, you know, they thought maybe they had something, but then they, maybe they talked themselves out of it and they could have ran into another community member or FinOps foundation staff at an event and we're like, no, you have a great story. You have an amazing thing that should be shared. Um, so it's really great to see so many different people applying for these talks. And it really runs the gamut of the maturity of, uh, the conversations and new voices, voices that are trusted voices that we've heard before. I mean, I'm so excited. It gets better every year. It just levels up every single year. It's so impressive.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. We have a good talk today, don't we?

Speaker C: We do. This one is fun. It's a segue from our year end review episode that we did in December with Sam Benson. And this episode's kind of like one of those Venn diagrams. Personally, I think it's important for finops practitioners to do a lot of stakeholder management this year because there's so many things happening in the industry. The expansion of focus from FinOps practitioners to SaaS and licensing and data center, and there's AI coming into the mix. There's a whole lot of things happening. Uh, so I think stakeholder management is really important. And then we have this Focus Project which is making strides in the industry. A lot of adoption getting picked up. And I kind of see this like one of those Venn diagrams where you have focus, you have stakeholder management and how they overlap to help each other. So I talked with Larry Advi.

Speaker B: Oh wow. I love Larry.

Speaker C: Yeah, he's great. He's a focus maintainer. He's a, uh, FinOps ambassador and a Focus ambassador. The first Focus ambassador. So he talks about the Focus Project and specifically the nomenclature of focus that can help clarify the language of cloud which makes stakeholder management Easier because you're trying to erase the confusion, bridge the gap between understandings. And we talk about how you can use focus to bridge that gap.

Speaker B: Ooh, this sounds like a uh, podcast that I'm definitely going to have the training team link out to in the FinOps Certified Focus Analyst course because that is, that's a long title but that the Focus Analyst course certification because that's so important.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. There's so many ways to engage with a FOCUS project and this is a great first step is just learning the language.

Speaker B: Good. Awesome. Um, well, let's turn it over to Larry and see what amazing things he has to say. I'm excited to hear this.

Speaker C: All right, Larry, go time. First question, who are you?

Speaker A: Yeah, good question, Joe. Thank you. Uh, so my name is Larry. I also call myself Fred or Fred finops. I will wear a Flintstone hoodie and button down shirt and shoes and the whole gab at the conferences and I have a lot of fun with that. There's this whole story behind it too. But let me know if you want to hear it and I'll tell you, you know, at the conference, LinkedIn, whatever. But yeah, first and foremost I'm a FinOps practitioner. I've been doing this dedicated for the past three years about and I'm also a certified Finops professional, certified focused Analyst and a focus maintainer. So past few years I've done a lot of growth within this space. Loving the challenge, the fun and the opportunity and it's a great place to talk with like minded people who care about data, be it financial, be it operational observability. But it's all technology related data and I'm glad to be here.

Speaker C: Yeah. And you were on stage at FinOps X Europe. You did a panel during the keynote with uh, Sean Alpe, Karl Kraft and Irina Jurka and you were talking about being a finops maintainer for those who are listening. Maybe they weren't at finops X Europe, didn't see the live stream or the recording or not familiar with open source projects. Uh, can you explain a bit what you do as a maintainer for the FOCUS project?

Speaker A: Yeah. So as a maintainer it's a small group, mostly made of volunteers. Right. You get the FinOps foundation representatives, but it's volunteers that are practitioners like myself, uh, a couple vendors, cloud service provider personnel and you get a good mix. We've got I think it's 10 members right now. It's a small group of people who like to nerd out and get together talking about the Focus Standard and where it's at, where it's going and why Focus being the finops cost and usage specification. And we think about the vision of Focus, you know first and foremost. And like, like I said at X when I was on stage, um, I referenced an old ah, I'll say built back in the 70s, the EDI electronic data interchange standard that I used 20 plus years ago. My prior company, a great thing for what it did but it really lacks and I'll say adoption and it being really known. But I believe that with Focus we started with the cloud providers. We're going to evolve forward to SaaS and other spaces in the future Here that Focus will be the open standard to look at to deploy and consume any sort of financial cost data and information. And so as a maintainer it's looking at, okay, we've got data today from cloud providers that are in different formats and bringing it all together into one, normalizing it, standardizing it, making it easy to consume for people so that the interoperability and then the adoptions much, much easier than say you approach any of the cloud providers completely green and unknown. There's a lot of columns and information in their data set. Uh, Focus helps reduce that down and boil it down to these are the most important columns and then we shepherd forward additional columns to add that are being added for very specific and impactful reasons. And we lead the standard changes the PRs, the issues, talking to the community, getting feedback. Um, we really showcased a lot of that at X in Europe and looking forward to x here in 2025 in San Diego doing a lot more of that where we have a dedicated focus room and it was slammed ah in Europe. So I just imagine that you know, with a lot more attendees and people at San Diego that we'll get a lot more of attention, a lot more feedback. So really we had some awesome ideas coming from folks that we hadn't thought of. We've added that to the backlog and we've discussed it and we'll uh, be looking at reprioritizing things with version 1.3 coming up clear later this year.

Speaker C: And 1.4, yeah it is, it is really cool because the entire idea of fooocus, like it's almost, it's almost too simple, right? Just bring together all the cloud billing data and usage data plus other resource billing and usage data into one normalized format. It sounds so simple but actually like I'm continuing to learn, I've, I've, I've been watching this. I, I'm not an Active part of the project. I've been watching it from the side this entire time and I still get like, oh, that's. You can do that with focus. Oh, that focus allows you to do that. Oh that, that would, that would have helped me out when I was a practitioner. Even for folks who, you know, it's right now only version 1.1 is generally available. Right. So, you know, it's still really early in the development. There's still tons of promise and development still to go, but there's benefit that people can get by starting to use it now and not maybe not even in the data sets. Because I was talking with Rob Martin, kind of pushing him a bit to help me learn how I can best, uh, support the community and encourage adoption of focus. And he said, start using the focus nomenclature is a great step one. You don't have to start using focus data as your primary source yet, but start using the nomenclature. And he was challenging us as a foundation staff to start using the nomenclature. And that struck me because I want to encourage people to do stakeholder management this year. I think there's a lot going on with, uh, AI becoming more prevalent with FinOps practitioners being asked to do more than just cloud spend management and governance. I think there's a lot of aspects that finops practitioners are not going to feel necessarily in control of. So I think stakeholder management is very important and I think normalizing nomenclature terms is a great step to bridge that understanding gap between all your different stakeholders. Perfect example to me was when I was the leader of the FinOps team. We were an AWS shop and then we started setting up Azure and then the engineers who were setting up the Azure and I was trying to get make sure that we set up the account hierarchy correctly and they kept saying subscriptions and in my head it was like, what do you mean? No, no, no, we only have one payer account. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they would use the Azure terminology and I would get confused and then I would have to understand it and relearn it and I would confuse them because I would be using AWS nomenclature. So it made perfect sense to me. Like, oh yeah, I wish there was. This is what we would refer to that regardless of what cloud you use, right?

Speaker A: Absolutely. Joe. I 100% agree. I'll say saying this differently, it's a language problem. That's something that we have to really persistently and at the forefront think about when we're developing focus and the language and the nomenclature that we're writing down. We're committing to must be meaningful and clear as much as possible. So you mentioned shifting from AWS to Azure to gcp. Things dance around the same themes of virtual servers or instances, things like that, but they're not in the same level. And focus brings it to that standardization, that same level to where folks can hopefully read that and then be able to draw the connection. And as part of my vision and thought. Right. I think focus will get so much momentum behind it that will then cause changes within the industry to then the focus language, that nomenclature is now the standard and how to refer to this resource type or this, that and the other uh, what do you call a virtual machine or an instance or a server or whatever it is.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: It could very well lead to that, which is good, I'll uh, say in general. Right. So it's not just about the data nerding on about that, but the language of uh, why do we call it, you know, this versus that? And it makes me think of and makes me chuckle because in 1.1 we had this conversation over weeks about this thing called potato. We didn't know what to call it. We were dancing around it, we were challenging each other, having lots of really great, awesome, I'll say passionate conversations. It was really fun. But the potato being really boiling down to skew at the end of the day. Right. But this is the idea we have. What do we call the thing? Why who's got this idea versus that? And we want all these opinions within that, which is why we send out the focus standard before it's officialized, that it gets lots of different eyes and perspectives not only from internal but uh, external as well. So that what we're putting down is hopefully it's a good product in the day. That's our goal. And we know that the development, the adoption, the use of it, like that's not going to happen overnight. And that's okay. And we realize as well we'll likely make mistakes too, but we can fix those. Right. We started with cloud and now we're looking at SaaS and other use cases that the framework that the Fan Apps foundation, it's evolving into these scopes. And I'll say for myself that at Twilio it's true for my team and I think it's true for a lot of other teams that you're already doing a lot of the non cloud type of governance, spend, control, management type of work. Right. And so you've got data centers, you've got licensing, you've got SaaS, you've got network connectivity, you've got infrastructure, you've got lots of different things that folks like what you're doing with Synops and then they draw their connection over to these other scopes and you bring it together. And that's why with my vision, with focus is to drive it much further beyond just cloud and SaaS. But I think it can really be a communication layer for how to standardize and how to speak and communicate both verbally and electronically. First and foremost, the billing data.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Uh, could be usage, could be observability, could be other things going in the future. It's a great place to start. And like you said, stakeholder management, making things as simple as possible to communicate and get people aligned. So you're not arguing about the AWS language versus the Azure language or this or that. This is what we're going to use and here's our dictionary. Right?

Speaker C: Yeah. And language is something a FinOps practitioner can control. So. All right, Larry, let's show people how they can do this. Step one, Take off your focus hat for a moment. You're the Twilio finops leader, all right. And I'm just going to say you're multi cloud. I don't want to dive into the details of your stack. Let's say you're in Amazon, Microsoft and Google. So just uh, at the onset right there you have accounts, subscriptions and projects all essentially the same thing.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: So before you're talking to your finance people, before you're talking to any IT leadership or developers outside of infrastructure, you're already got multiple words to say the same thing. So you think this focus nomenclature idea is great. Where do you go to find these words?

Speaker A: Yeah. So there is, I say first and foremost the focus.finops.org website.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: That has a lot of really great information on there as well as the column library. So start there looking through what are the actual columns within Fooocus. So you're talking about the building account id, there's sub account id, there's different categorizations of different aspects, pricing, data, region, all things like that. Right. But there's not hundreds of columns. Right? There's, there's 51 columns right now. And you can go out there and start exploring and seeing like, oh, here are the columns, this is what they're called and why. Right, right. The next step to that would be looking at. And I, and I love that this got deployed at Exon Barcelona and I love this on the website and the thinner foundation for putting this out there. There's this sandbox. Go out there, play with the sandbox, and explore real data in the focus data set from the three major cloud providers. And you could look at the data and start understanding. Oh, this column's for this, this column's for that. And then go back to the column library. Oh, okay. Yep. Here's some more details and information. An additional step I'll say, beyond just looking at the sandbox and the column library, is also looking at the use cases. So I spend a lot of time in, in 1.0 leading a team on developing the various 1.0 use cases, what columns should be in the use cases, and why? What are the SQL queries that you could run on top of the focus data set? So if you have a focus data set, you can find the use case you want, take the SQL query and run it on top of it. And it's generally ANSI compliant, m, multiple, M, MySQL, Athena, whatever you want to run on top of, it'll work. Right? With the use cases, you can look at and say, oh, I need to be able to report spending across billing periods for a provider by service category, for instance. And here are the columns. Here's the context behind the use case, here's the SQL query. And then we also related the Personas and capabilities that link to that particular use case too. So you can look at it and slice and dice it from various different perspectives.

Speaker C: That's awesome. So let's walk through that. All right. I know this is an audio format and people are either driving their car or walking their dog or getting lost in the woods listening to this. Uh, so we'll keep it. We'll keep it pretty simple. So. Focus.finops.org we do a really good job of keeping all our websites up to date. So at the current moment, under the specification tab is the column library. And you can filter on the side. So if we went to billing and filtered on that. So in our example of account versus subscription versus project, the focus nomenclature for that is billing account. Right?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Billing account. It's super simple. And it's just kind of like, uh, actually, I had to. I actually did a lot of checking because I'm like, oh, yeah, that is a billing account. Is it? And it just feels right. Billing account. Like that. That's what they are. And it's kind of funny, I was like, why aren't they just called that? So I think that's how you guys know you did a really good job choosing the right name. Because I'm like, yeah, it's billing account. So simple. So if you were the finoff practitioner and you were talking to your finance partner or you're talking to whoever and they want to understand their different charges, you don't need to go into, well, your Google Project or your Amazon account or your Microsoft subscription and then add a layer of potential confusion by using different words for the same thing. You could just say billing account, your, uh, Microsoft billing account, your Google billing account. And that just made it easier for your partner to understand you. That's awesome.

Speaker A: Right? Right. And building account being from a language perspective, the very generic, highest level way to organize the rest of everything else. Right. And not, you know, not letting or allowing bias to creep in from the providers. They're involved as part of these conversations too. Right.

Speaker C: So you're teaching me, and this is really cool because I'm taking this challenge too. I want to start using focus words. Right. I want to use this nomenclature going forward. So if any of you catch me saying things that aren't in focus nomenclature, you know, you can call me out on it. I will get annoyed with you. But you're doing the right thing. So under that specification, there is the sandbox, which is really cool because you can select a whole lot of different use cases and click Run query and it will show you the data. But what I really like is you called out the use case library. I think this is going to be a really great way to learn the nomenclature. I'm going to click on forecasting here as a capability in the use cases and you want to. It has a whole list of things here. Forecast, amortized costs month over month based on historical trends. I'm going to click that one and it tells me the columns. Provider. That means what? Cloud. Right. Or in the future. In the future, beyond cloud. SaaS.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's the identifier for who provided the service or who generated the data.

Speaker B: Awesome.

Speaker C: Uh, billing, start date. That's pretty, you know, month.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Or when the period started.

Speaker A: Right. Could be daily, could be monthly. Yes. Service category, what do you think? When you think service category, what do you think?

Speaker C: I think is it compute? Is it storage?

Speaker A: Right. So it's the highest level classification, uh, of a service. Yeah. Compute. Storage. Um, mobile, networking, security. Yes.

Speaker C: Charge category. Tell me about that one.

Speaker A: Yeah, so charge category is the highest level classification. It's a category. So again, a theme with words here. Highest classification of a charge. So a charge being, is it based on is a usage, purchase, tax, credit or adjustment. There's different categories of charges.

Speaker C: So how it's being how the charge is working. Is it you know, one time each month or is it per use and you're being metered for it across the

Speaker A: given period as well, there's a time component or assumed a time component that goes with it. Again, that's why billing period start is in that list as well.

Speaker C: Awesome. Effective cost.

Speaker A: Yeah. So like the use case says it's amortized costs.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: Effective cost is amateurized column. It's the one that I'll say you generally use as the cost columns go. So it's the cost after applying all reduced rates, discounts, applicable portions of relevant prepaid purchases, et cetera, et cetera. So it is like your net amortized cost uh, on aws similar to the other ones, but it's that financial construct where you're including all your commitment based discounts, all your other discounts in your contract, everything, etc. All in the one column that that's why I said it's generally the one that most you want to use is effective cost.

Speaker C: So already I'm going back to my practitioner days. If I just said effective cost when I'm getting the exasperated product owner or whoever received that charge back and they're saying how much is this costing me? I I say your effective cost is blank and then I cut past all the reserved instances, committed use discounts, all that I'm telling them exactly what their effective cost is. Again, it just helps get people to understanding faster. So this is great. You know, I'm going to use this use case library to help me learn which columns, which focus nomenclature I need to use. So if I'm going to be doing an episode on forecasting or licensing in SaaS, I can click on that, look at the use cases here and pick up the words I need to use. And I think anybody could do that. This is a great step one, right? Just getting used to the words. And then when you're ready, focus.finops.org shows how to turn on your focus data feeds from the cloud providers and you can start using your own focus data. But I think this is a really painless and very effective way to start learning focus.

Speaker A: Ah, absolutely Joe. The website has grown over the past couple years and really super helpful, easy to consume, easy to think about the state of information. And I'm going to plug now general that, you know, folks will look at this data from their perspectives and they'll think about new use cases. What about this? What about that?

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker A: And we want to hear from people, we've got over 100 members who are CLA certified and CLA signed within the Focus project itself, meaning they're legally able to work on the project. And that's one avenue to participate in this. Right? That's the. I really love this. I'm really passionate and I want to spend a few hours a week working with these folks to do this and happy to talk about more with folks up questions about expectations meetings and set the other. Right. But again a few hours a week you're spending time to work on this. But if you go like hey, I'm looking at the use case library and I don't see this or I'm looking at the columns and I don't see that on the Focus website there's a support and feedback link where you can submit feedback to us directly. You know Async, boom, drop it. And so it's a, it's a quick form, it's easy to do. Or if you're a part of the FinOps Foundation Slack community, which absolutely recommend folks to be joining because there's questions and knowledge and contacts and a uh, community that's fantastic for helping just across the board, across Phnops you get people from. I just started this thing. What does this mean to. I've been doing this for 10 years even though it wasn't called FinOps. Right. On the FinOps Foundation Slack there is a hashtag chat dash focus channel where you can raise these concerns there and it will get picked up by FinOps foundation members, by Focus members, maintainers, et cetera. We want to hear back from folks and if we don't feel like we're getting enough, I'll say representation and voices in the room. As part of the folks that are working on Focus, we will run surveys, we will join calls, we will do polls, other ways to get feedback from the community on how to do a certain thing. The most recent one was with tags and we were having a very passionate debate as the maintainers about this. We're like we need to open this up community because we're kind of deadlocked on it. We need more feedback, right?

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker A: And we ran polls and ran conversations with the community and we're able to get gain consensus. We're here about consensus. We hear about let's do the right thing for practitioners, for the community. And I'll uh, say that the world because I uh, uh think this is awesome. FinOps foundation is definitely globally present. There's so many people from so many countries that I meet at these conferences on the working groups. So on and so forth. It's truly something that's really bright within the industry right now.

Speaker C: On that global note, 100% we have people all across the globe contributing to this. I'll give props to the European Community. They have been just nailing contribution and adoption and there's just a ton of great focus stories coming from Europe and helping drive this project forward. So, you know, make sure your local community is being represented here. Uh, and throw your two cents into focus please. Because like Larry's saying, consensus, your opinion may be the one that helps bridge the gap between two different people. Which is exactly what we're trying to do here with this episode is bridge the gap between two understandings and focus nomenclature is a way that you can do that in your own personal finops practice. And then your finops practice can be the reverse of that, the bridging the gap in the Focus project. So it's a virtuous cycle here. Thank you very much, Larry. This is, I think a great step for folks who haven't started yet down the Focus journey.

Speaker A: You're welcome. Awesome.

Speaker C: How can people reach out to you?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm on the Slack community. Look up Larry advy or on LinkedIn either. The two work very well for me. Awesome.

Speaker C: Thanks, Larry. And will they see at FinOps X?

Speaker A: Yes. I'm really excited to get back this year and we are Planning to announce 1.2 in June. We're having really awesome conversations around SaaS right now on how to expand focus further. I'm really looking forward to what we're going to deliver with SaaS and then a lot of good conversations around sustainability as well. We heard Sustainability FX Europe and we took that feedback and we're people in the room as part of Focus today. The maintainers, we're not SMEs on sustainability so we've actually kicked off a research group since then and we're pulling in folks that are know about sustainability, know about that space and we're challenging them to dream big and bring that back to us. And let's have a conversation about how we can converge those two together. So yeah, be at FinOps X. I'll be on my Fred Flintstone, uh, hoodie, you know, button down shirt. There may be another one that, that I may. I've been thinking about too. I got a nice little recommendation from somebody but we'll see what I can find.

Speaker C: Well, you'll stand out.

Speaker A: Yes, Perfect.

Speaker C: Perfect. Thank you, Larry.

Speaker A: Thank you, Joe.

Speaker B: M.

Speaker C: Well, there you go. The Focus Project is trying to solve a language problem Sometimes things sound like they might be really challenging to approach. For example, my background's in finance and maybe I would be intimidated to go start digging around in my own focus data on my own. I don't think anyone should feel that way though. Go to focus.finops.org and start learning. Start by learning the language. These words are agreed upon in the industry. You can leverage them and cut through any unintended confusion due to having different providers referring to the same things with different words. More clear language can lead towards less confusion and help you gain buy in and clear communication with your stakeholders and partners. Perhaps then you can feel more confident to download your own focus data and start getting your hands dirty with that. Also, regarding Finops X, if you're the type of person who listens all the way to the end like this, I better see you at uh, Finops X. Go register@x.finops.org tell Stacy how much you love the podcast in person. That's it for this episode. Thank you so much to Larry Advi and all the focus maintainers. These folks spend hours each week on the project. Not a joke. They're dedicated to driving this forward for the community. A huge thank you to them and especially for Larry for spending time talking with me and helping me learn focus nomenclature. Big thank you to Stacy Case as always for starting us off with energy. And thank you to you. We appreciate you and your interest in what you can learn from the community. That's it for today. Keep on finopsing M.