Making FOCUS Work in Practice: Lessons from Elo's FinOps Journey Beyond Cloud

IBM Cloudability Principal Product Manager Keenan Dolan interviews Lucas, a FinOps analyst at Elo, one of Brazil's largest payment companies, on how his team made FOCUS work in practice to reach 100% product chargeback. Elo runs five clouds and more than 200 tech suppliers to support over 5 billion transactions a year, and started with roughly 35% of cost dumped into an infrastructure catch-all bucket and 23,000 applications sprawled across AKS. Lucas explains how FOCUS gave them one common language to standardize cloud and non-cloud costs, how they untangled direct versus shared costs with per-supplier allocation rules, and how the payoff, 100% chargeback across 75 products and 25 product owners, lets finance and product teams build P&Ls with full accuracy. Keenan adds the market view: treating a Kubernetes cluster as a "cloud within a cloud," why raw data fetch is becoming commoditized while standardization and allocation create the real value, and practical advice for adopting FOCUS at scale (start small, get tagging right, align to how work is funded). 00:00 Intro: Elo, Multi-Cloud Scale, and the Data Complexity Problem 03:17 What Broke First: Lost Ownership Across 23,000 AKS Applications 05:08 Allocation, FOCUS, and Reaching 100% Product Chargeback 11:13 The Dashboard and the Kubernetes "Three-Layer Cake" 13:47 Common Mistakes, the Workflow Model, and What's Next 23:17 Audience Q&A Watch the Day 1 Keynote and Tokenomics Foundation announcement: https://www.youtube.com/live/W4g8xvduIbs Watch the Day 2 Keynote: https://www.youtube.com/live/vyQTW0PLw7A Learn more about Token Economics: https://tokeneconomics.com https://focus.finops.org https://x.finops.org https://join.finops.org #FinOps #FinOpsX #FOCUS #Chargeback #Kubernetes