Definition #
A Tag is an essential metadata for organizing and managing resources in Cloud Computing environments . It is a value pair composed of a key (Name) and a value (Value) , which allows you to categorize and identify resources in the cloud efficiently. For example, you can create a tag with the Name “Department” and the Value “IT” or “Marketing”.
Tags play a key role in infrastructure management across providers such as AWS , Azure , Google Cloud , Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) , and Huawei Cloud , facilitating tasks such as cost control, resource tracking, and security policy enforcement.
Names for business use #
When implementing tags in your Cloud Computing infrastructure , it is essential to choose clear and consistent names to make it easier to categorize and manage resources.
Some useful suggestions include: “costcenter” , to track expenses associated with specific projects or departments; “customer” , to identify resources allocated to specific customers; “product” , “department” , “environment” , “service” , etc.
Tips and some precautions: #
- Use only lowercase letters . In addition to standardization, Google Cloud only accepts lowercase letters in labels. Lowercase tags/labels can be compared and cross-referenced in MultiCloud environments. Lowercase is a unique rule and avoids doubts such as “CentroCustos”? “Centrocustos”? Easier “centrocustos”;
- Do not use special characters . Do not use accents, spaces, commas, etc. Special characters make readability difficult and can easily get out of control and out of the standard. Even if it is professional names with accents, it is better to keep the ASCII standard;
- Do not use very generic tags such as ‘Name’ or ‘Name’ as they do not add value and bring a lot of data. Cloud8 is able to bring the individual cost of the components without having to resort to tags;
- In the case of AWS that needs to choose the tags, we strongly suggest that it tag the tags that it manages itself : “aws:createdBy”, “aws:ecs:serviceName”, “aws:ecs:clusterName”, “aws:autoscaling:groupName”, “aws:eks:cluster-name”
Process #
Have a clear business process that defines how to create and use tags.
Define a set of tags (3-4 is a good number) and tag all components. Tag all components avoids exception handling and avoids documenting which components need tag A, B, or C. If it doesn’t make business sense, leave the value as ‘unused’ or ‘undefined’. These values can be computed in reports and can certainly answer questions like “Which components don’t need a department or owner?”
It is important to define how to tag new components. If you use provisioning frameworks such as Terraform, Cloudformation, Ansible, and others, you can define tags when creating components within the scripts. Don’t forget to configure automatic processes such as Auto Scaling that will also create servers and disks. Backups should propagate tags (Cloud8 supports copying tags from a server to snapshots automatically), and so on.
See : How to add Tags via CSV file .
Tags on cloud providers #
- AWS : Choose which tags to display in your Cost And Usage Reports data at https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?region=us-east-1#/preferences/tags
- Azure, Google Cloud, Huawei and Oracle : will publish all tags that the components have
- Azure : We process component tags and Resource Group tags. You can choose whether you want to tag all components or just RGs. Tagging RGs is easier, but requires that the components are allocated correctly. Cloud8 shows RG tags as a prefix “azure:rg:”. For example: “azure:rg:centrocustos” which will be different from simply “centrocustos”
Limitations on tag registration #
- Tags do not propagate retroactively . The day and time you mark the tags is the start of accounting by the cloud provider. Ideally, you should insert them immediately when creating the components and review them before starting the next accounting period (for example, before the end of the month);
- Different spellings – such as a single space – are considered different groupings – which is why we recommend using lowercase and ASCII.
- Not all components support tags . Check with your provider for more information. Note: Cloud8 has a feature to map what is untagged (Untag) – more on this later.
