Why you need “Tags” for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

If you are new to cloud computing, you might not yet understand the importance of tags. However, with some experience, you’ll realize that tags are crucial for billing, automation, scripting, and smooth operations. Tags can make a big difference in development workflows, preventing chaos and costly mistakes. Here are some examples and use cases for tags:

Simplify cost management & analysis

Imagine we form part of a company that has multiple departments and within those departments, we have various projects — All of them utilizing cloud services. How do you run an expense report against the budget of each department if the invoice only lists the services and not each resource even if it did list the resources, how would you know which of the 3 resources with the same name belongs to which department? This is precisely where tags come into the equation. Simply, search for the department code or name within the tags and aggregate the result in a service report. Of course, when it comes to cloud computing, there are many ways to solve the problem listed below but tags are the best practice and easiest method.

Resource segregation

Following the previous billing example, we can expand to the segregation of these resources. Whether the aim is to locate the resources for a certain application, groups of authorized users, or for the sake of resource awareness tags are the best way to locate and isolate these resources –Of course depending on the cloud platform, you can opt for resource groups.

Locate orphaned resources

The nice thing about using cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud is that it makes creating new resources extremely easy! (such as servers, managed DB’s, and other costly resources) On one hand, that’s great but it also increases the number of orphaned resources, duplicates, and other rogue elements. With all that, things can easily get out of hand with departments that terminate and re-create many resources daily — note, this may not reference the production environment but it certainly can apply to any development or sandbox environment.

Security

Good cloud engineers and architects think about security. The very best cloud engineers and architects start with security — yeah, that’s my cloud spin to the security as a feature V.S. built-around security. Tags offer a great deal of granularity when it comes to security. Through tags, we can apply a large number of IAM policies and security scripts. These can automate the heavy lifting of monitoring and incident response from a very busy cloud architect and SecOps team.

Scripting & Automation

Tags are the rocket fuel of cloud scripting and automation. Sure, it is possible to script and automate purely through filtering and correlation but why walk 30 miles in the rain when you can drive there? Tags make the process far easier and faster –not to mention it opens the door to more innovative ideas. Any sane person working in the cloud computing community will agree with that.

Hopefully, after reading this article, you will have a new view on the use of tags and why they are so important.