AWS Tagging Best Practices

Effective infrastructure resource tagging can greatly improve management, IaC, monitoring and cost visibility in AWS.

AWS Resource Tagging

Tags are used for provisioning, monitoring, and cost control.

Consistent Naming: Use a consistent naming convention for your tags to make them easy to understand and manage.
Use Tags Strategically: Tag resources based on their purpose, owner, environment, or any other relevant criteria. This helps with organization.
Automation: Consider using automation tools like AWS Lambda to automatically assign tags to resources based on predefined rules.
Enforce Tagging: Use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to enforce tagging policies within your organization.
Cost Allocation: Use tags to track and allocate costs effectively. This is especially important in multi-tenant environments.
Monitor and Audit: Regularly review and audit your tagged resources to ensure compliance with tagging policies.
Document Tagging Standards: Document your tagging standards and communicate them to your team to ensure consistency.
Tagging at Resource Creation: Whenever possible, tag resources at the time of creation to avoid missing tags.
Avoid Over-Tagging: While tagging is important, avoid over-tagging, as it can lead to confusion and unnecessary complexity.
Educate Teams: Educate your teams on the importance of tagging and how it benefits resource management and cost tracking.

Recommended AWS tags

All the AWS resources created with Terraform should have tags added that follow a company-wide standard.

ansible-aws-ec2-terraform-tags - ansible-aws-ec2-terraform-tags-ec2.png

IT Wonder Lab recommended tags:

Name [name]: the name of the instance or resource. It should be unique and follows the Cloud-Resource-Environment-Visibility-Name/ID format (see EC2 Instances and Resource Security for details)
Private Name [private_name]: The private name for this element, is used for DNS registration in a private zone and should follow a standard and be unique. It can be used for monitoring and server naming.
Public Name [public_name]: The public name for the element, it can be used in DNS registration in public zones and can be the same for many instances, as instances can be behind load balancers. In RDS it is the same as the private name.
App [app]: The name of the main application that will be used in the resource.
App ID [app_id]: A unique characteristic of the application or a number that can be used to differentiate multiple different instances of the same application, for example, imagine you have to release the same application in the same environment, App ID could be the release number.
OS [os]: The operating system of the instance, useful for applying the basic configuration.
Environment [environment]: Used for environment identification, it is a 3 letter acronym for the environment:
Cost Center [cost_center]: one or many cost centers that this resource should be assigned to. The cost center is used in billing to classify resources, for example, if you provide resources for different customers, some resources are shared and others are costs associated with a specific customer.

Values should all be in lowercase without spaces.

AWS Best Practices

AWS

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Javier Ruiz

IT Wonder Lab tutorials are based on the rich and diverse experience of Javier Ruiz, who founded and bootstrapped a SaaS company in the energy sector. His company, which was later acquired by a NASDAQ traded company, managed over €2 billion per year of electricity for prominent energy producers across Europe and America. Javier has more than 20 years of experience in building and managing IT companies, developing cloud infrastructure, leading cross-functional teams, and transitioning his own company from on-premises, consulting, and custom software development to a successful SaaS model that scaled globally.

2 comments on “AWS Tagging Best Practices”

How to use Ansible and Terraform together? - Cloud Automation Tutorials - IT Wonder Lab says:

7 September, 2023 at 3:19 PM

[…] Best Practice: Tagging all resourcesAll the AWS resources created with Terraform had tags added that follow a company-wide standard. Tags are used for provisioning, monitoring and cost control. Check AWS Resource Tagging best practices. […]

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Ansible Multiple Environment Best Practices - Cloud Automation Tutorials - IT Wonder Lab says:

7 September, 2023 at 5:25 PM

[…] Handling multiple infrastructure environments with Ansible is easily done by targeting the environment tag that is included in the mandatory AWS Tags. See AWS Tagging Best Practices. […]

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