Praman Deep Singh - Cloud Center of Excellence
Tags serve as metadata attached to cloud resources like virtual machines, storage accounts, and databases, comprising user-defined key-value pairs. They aid in describing and identifying resources within an organization's cloud environments. Tags can be applied to subscriptions, resource groups, and Azure resources. A robust tagging strategy is essential for gaining comprehensive insights into cloud consumption and expenditure. It fosters accountability and ownership, enhances resource visibility, and facilitates various operational tasks. Additionally, proper tagging enables chargeback, allowing organizations to trace resource consumption back to the departments, thereby addressing the biggest challenge of organizations with multiple business units.
Simplifying complexity
Despite the significance of tagging, implementing an effective strategy, particularly in multi-cloud environments, can be complex due to limitations imposed by cloud providers. This complexity often undermines efforts by IT teams to instill a tagging culture within their organizations, relegating it to a mere task for business units. To address this issue, here are some examples of tagging strategy best practices and how to enforce tagging policies in the organization.
Best practices for creating a tagging strategy
- Define a tagging taxonomy. Develop a hierarchical structure tailored to organizational needs, flexible enough to accommodate future changes.
- Use consistent naming conventions. Employ clear, consistent naming conventions to ensure universal understanding and usability.
- Utilize descriptive tags. Opt for descriptive tags accurately portraying the tagged resource, facilitating easy identification and searchability.
- Limit the number of tags. Avoid cluttering resources with excessive metadata by using a limited number of tags.
- Automate tagging. Automate tagging with the help of tools like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions to ensure consistent tag application.
- Implement inheritance. Employ inheritance to automatically propagate parent tags to child items, streamlining tag management and reducing errors.
Tagging strategy example
Business unit: Identifies the business unit that owns the resource Environment: Indicates the resource's operational environment (e.g., development, staging, production)
Application: Identifies the associated application
Cost center: Specifies the responsible cost center
Owner: Designates the resource owner responsible for approvals
Effective enforcement of tagging policies
Cloud provider-specific tools such as Azure Policy or AWS Organizations can enforce tagging policies. For instance, Azure Policy's predefined or custom policy definitions can be assigned to resource groups or entire subscriptions to ensure compliance with tagging requirements. Similarly, AWS Organizations, coupled with service control policies (SCPs), enable the enforcement of tag policies during resource creation and maintenance. By implementing tagging policies, organizations can streamline resource management, enhance accountability, and ensure compliance with tagging guidelines.
Limitations of tags
Below is a table covering the limitations of tags from the two biggest cloud providers per market share:
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AWS |
Azure |
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50 tags per resource limit (in most cases) |
15 tags per resource limit |
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Each tag key must have a unique and single value. |
Each tag key must have a unique and single value. |
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Both the tag keys and values are case-sensitive. |
Only the tag values are case-sensitive. |
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The maximum allowed key length is 128 characters. |
The maximum allowed key length is 512 characters (except for storage accounts). |
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The maximum allowed value length is 256 characters. |
The maximum allowed value length is 256 characters. |
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Prefix “AWS:” is reserved and cannot be used. |
Some copyrighted Microsoft terms (like “Windows,” “Azure,” and “Microsoft”) are reserved and cannot be used. |
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Allowed characters are letters, numbers, spaces, and special characters: . : + = @ _ / - |
Following characters cannot be used in tags: , %, &, , ?, / If you need to include spaces in tags, first enclose them in double quotes (e.g., “Demo environment”). |
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