Updated 26 March 2026
The FinOps Framework Explained
The FinOps Foundation defines a framework with three maturity stages and six core domains. Understanding where your organisation sits helps you prioritise the right activities to reduce cloud costs effectively.
Maturity Stages: Crawl, Walk, Run
Crawl
Gaining visibility
Months 1-3
5-10% of spend
The Crawl stage is about establishing basic cloud cost visibility and creating a shared understanding across teams. Many organisations discover they are in the Crawl stage without realising it when they first audit their cloud spending seriously.
Characteristics at this stage
- ›Basic cost reporting from cloud provider consoles
- ›Limited or no resource tagging for cost allocation
- ›Cloud costs managed reactively when bills surprise stakeholders
- ›No regular review cadence or cost ownership by teams
- ›Savings primarily from one-off rightsizing and terminating obvious waste
Goals to reach the next stage
- ✓Implement a tagging strategy covering team, environment, and product
- ✓Establish a monthly cost review meeting with engineering and finance
- ✓Enable budget alerts for anomaly detection
- ✓Identify the top 10 most expensive resources and review each one
- ✓Calculate your current waste percentage as a baseline
Walk
Optimising and allocating
Months 3-12
15-30% of spend
The Walk stage is where most FinOps value is created. Teams have visibility, cost ownership is established, and the organisation starts making systematic optimisation decisions rather than one-off fixes.
Characteristics at this stage
- ›Consistent tagging across 80%+ of cloud resources
- ›Cost allocated to business units or product teams (showback or chargeback)
- ›Regular cadence of rightsizing reviews and commitment purchases
- ›Engineering teams have dashboards and own their cloud budgets
- ›Reserved Instance or Savings Plan coverage above 50%
Goals to reach the next stage
- ✓Achieve 90%+ tagging compliance with automated enforcement
- ✓Purchase Reserved Instances or Savings Plans for stable workloads
- ✓Implement auto-scaling for variable workloads
- ✓Establish unit economics (cost per transaction, cost per user)
- ✓Create a FinOps team or assign cloud cost champions in each team
Run
Automating and scaling
Month 12+
25-40%+ of spend
The Run stage represents continuous, automated optimisation embedded into engineering workflows. Cloud cost is treated as a first-class engineering metric alongside performance and reliability.
Characteristics at this stage
- ›Automated policy enforcement with guardrails and approval workflows
- ›Anomaly detection with real-time alerts and automated remediation
- ›RI/Savings Plan coverage above 70% with continuous optimisation
- ›Cost-per-unit metrics tracked in team OKRs and engineering metrics
- ›Cloud cost forecasting accurate to within 5-10% for planning
Goals to reach the next stage
- ✓Implement automated rightsizing with engineering approval gates
- ✓Integrate cloud cost into CI/CD pipelines (cost-per-PR metrics)
- ✓Achieve and maintain sub-10% waste rate
- ✓Use Spot or preemptible instances for 30-50% of eligible compute
- ✓Build financial models for new features before they are deployed
The Six FinOps Domains
The FinOps Foundation defines six functional domains that a mature FinOps practice operates across. Most organisations start with the first two and progressively expand.
Understanding Cloud Usage and Cost
The foundation of FinOps. Teams need accurate, timely data on what is being spent, by whom, and on what. This includes tagging, cost allocation, and building the data pipelines that feed all other FinOps activities.
Performance Tracking and Benchmarking
Measuring cloud efficiency against targets and industry benchmarks. This domain converts raw cost data into actionable metrics: cost per customer, cost per transaction, cloud unit economics.
Real-Time Decision Making
Moving from monthly or quarterly reviews to continuous, near-real-time optimisation decisions. Engineering teams consume cost data alongside performance metrics as part of normal operations.
Cloud Rate Optimisation
Reducing the unit price of cloud resources through commitment-based discounts, negotiated contracts, and marketplace purchasing. This is often the highest-value FinOps activity for stable workloads.
Cloud Usage Optimisation
Reducing waste by eliminating idle resources, rightsizing oversized instances, and matching resource sizes to actual workload requirements. This is the first place most teams find quick wins.
Organisational Alignment
Embedding FinOps into culture, processes, and governance. This domain ensures that financial accountability is not just a tooling exercise but a shared organisational practice.
Quick Self-Assessment: What Stage Are You At?
You are in Crawl if...
- You cannot easily say which team owns each cloud cost
- Your cloud bill surprises you month to month
- Tagging is inconsistent or largely missing
- Cost reviews happen only when budgets are exceeded
You are in Walk if...
- Teams can see their own cloud costs in dashboards
- You have some Reserved Instance or Savings Plan coverage
- Monthly cost reviews happen with engineering present
- You know your rough waste percentage
You are in Run if...
- Cloud cost is a metric in engineering OKRs
- Automated policies enforce rightsizing and tagging
- RI/SP coverage exceeds 70% of eligible spend
- Forecasts are accurate and part of product planning