Chapter 2. Planning your tagging strategy

2.1. Why use tags?

Tags (also sometimes called labels) are a string of custom metadata assigned to resources that your organization can use in multiple ways.

In the context of cost management, tags help you to differentiate and allocate costs between various parts of your environment for a more accurate view of your cost data, filling the gap between business logic and the resource. This allows you to assign organizational-specific details to help digest information later.

As many projects and technical services (for example, environment, region, cost center) support a business service, tags can map business concepts to reports providing clarity. In that way, a properly allocated tag can help you to show costs grouped by those business concepts. Tags should be used to complement hierarchies in clouds, or specific hierarchies already present in your clusters (like projects).

Tags are sometimes utilized in more applications than cost management. For example, it is possible and recommended to use them to define certain operations, like business automation, operational profiles, or access and security controls. You can then apply policies based on those tags. However, this document does not consider those use cases. Cloud providers place limits on the number of tags or labels associated with resources, so you should consider all of those uses before defining your tagging strategy for cost management.

Additionally, tags are sometimes used to split resources into smaller units when it is not possible to directly organize resources into projects or subprojects. For example, a shared cluster running many services to provide different business capabilities can use tags to differentiate applications rather than splitting them into projects. Additionally, an AWS account can run multiple different services for projects, and sometimes those services are shared between several applications (like the load balancer or any other shared resource).

Furthermore, tags also help you identify relationships between sources, allowing you to group applications across multiple clusters tagged with the same environment, cost center, or team. Therefore, making it possible to identify the costs of an application when running on the development, quality, or production clusters. Tags can also help to identify dependencies when there is not a direct link between a resource, such as the link between an RDS database and the OpenShift project using it.

2.2. Considerations for your tagging strategy

When planning your tagging strategy, these considerations can help you decide how to organize and report costs for your sources.

Methodology
It is best practice to implement a Crawl, Walk, Run strategy when initially assigning tags for your resources. Start with the minimum number of tags you feel are required to accomplish your organizational objectives. Then slowly build on that foundation over time. As your understanding of how your organization leverages cost management grows, so will your skill in implementing a tagging strategy.
Map business to reporting

Define the business perspectives you want to report on. For example, your taxonomy for cost management could consider these different perspectives:

Ownership and usage:

Defining the owner and the user of the resource: for example, the unique identifier of the user who requested the resource, and the one that is actually consuming the resource.

Tenancy:

If your environment is shared, it can be beneficial to understand which group or business unit has requested the resource. When the user is part of different groups, one group needs to be selected. For cost reporting, you can achieve this in many cases using cost center; but department, project, or partner are also good candidates.

Location:

For organizations with software deployed globally, cloud providers already identify the region where your resources are running, but your private cloud may be different.

Environment or stage:

You may want to differentiate between development and production, so that different cost decisions can be made depending on the environment where you are creating or running the resources. If your development pipeline already includes stages, such as development, testing, staging, pre-production and production, this is a good candidate.

Application / Project / Service / Event:

Perhaps your environment is providing a service, such as a group of transient resources for an event (for example, your yearly customer-focused conference). You could even include the application version.

Standardize your labels

Consistency is the most important aspect of a tagging strategy to deliver accurate and comparable cost reporting results.

Create a clear tagging policy that defines what resources need to be tagged, what tags are mandatory and what tags are optional, making sure that there is no room for interpretation.

If the values need to be chosen between a list, verify that those values are defined, consistent, and easily accessible, or that the list is presented to the user. For example, if you are defining development with the key “Development”, do not also use variations such as “Dev”, “DEV”, or “R&D” to also identify resources as “Development”.

Tag all elements on your sources (manually or through automation)

Since untagged resources cannot be reported, tag as many elements as possible, ideally using automation to prevent human error. Sources have different automation features to take advantage of for tagging:

  • In Azure, you can use Azure Policies to enforce tagging rules and conventions and avoid resources being deployed that do not comply with your expectations. You can create a policy that automatically applies necessary tags during provisioning, that enforces a predefined format for dates, or that makes some tags mandatory for some resource type.
  • In AWS, you can use IAM policies for the same. Additionally, you can use an automation tool such as Ansible to add the necessary tags during provisioning and to verify that all the resources have been properly tagged.
  • OpenShift Container Platform does not presently have a method of automating labelling.
Review your tags often and refine as needed

Define your tags and use them as early as possible with cost management, even if you need to adjust your tagging scheme afterwards.

Review the resulting reports with your business owner and stakeholders early on to ensure your tags are helping you to generate the desired reports, and review your tagging strategy every few weeks to optimize it.

Select your tag terminology
  • Name your resources with names that allow you to identify your resources without accessing metadata, and then continue by adding metadata to it. Many clouds have a guide about how to do this properly; see Chapter 5, Additional resources for links.
  • Map your resources into keys and values. Keys will map to perspectives, while values will define the different options allowed for each key. In some cases, the value will be Null.
Note

Not all sources allow the same identifiers, and have different limitations. See Section 5.1, “Tag specifications by source type” for limitations by source.