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How It Works
The model, defined by the FinOps Foundation, organizes a team’s cloud cost management capabilities into three stages. In the Crawl stage, organizations have basic visibility into cloud spend and are establishing initial processes. In the Walk stage, teams are acting on cost data regularly, with defined ownership, tagging discipline, and some degree of commitment-based discounts in place. In the Run stage, cloud cost optimization is fully automated, deeply integrated into engineering and finance workflows, and continuously improving. Organizations do not need to run across every capability at once. Maturity is measured per capability, meaning a team can be at Run for allocation but still at Crawl for commitment coverage.
Why It Matters for Cloud Cost
Without a maturity model, cloud cost programs have no benchmark. Teams cannot identify gaps, prioritize improvements, or communicate progress to leadership. The model gives finance and engineering a shared language for where the organization stands and what advancing looks like in concrete terms. Companies stuck at Crawl often have significant unallocated spend, no commitment strategy, and no regular review cadence. Moving toward Walk and Run typically unlocks the largest efficiency gains, particularly through commitment-based discounts on AWS, Azure, and GCP, which require consistent forecasting and operational discipline to manage well. Also see to decode Multi-Cloud Savings Plan Strategy.
Usage AI’s Autopilot mode purchases and adjusts cloud commitments daily across AWS, GCP, and Azure without requiring human approval, removing manual commitment management from a team’s FinOps workload.