Continuous innovation, issue resolution and code enhancements are key factors that increase technology costs, making it difficult for developers as well as financial experts to keep a check on what exactly is driving their AWS spends. Effective AWS tagging strategy is the answer to identifying and managing resources along with understanding usage, costs and performance. Tagging AWS resources ensure effective cost management, enhanced cloud management and the ability to establish healthier governance strategies that leads to constructive business growth.
Let us look at some of the tagging strategies that you can consider and capitalize while managing your AWS resources –
- Tags to organize resources
Tags are an efficient way to consolidate and manage AWS resources in the AWS Management Console. Tags can be configured to resources that can later be searched and filtered by tags. AWS Resource Groups help create groups of AWS resources based on one or multiple tags, portions of tags or on basis of their occurrence in AWS CloudFormation stack. Tag Editor and Resource Groups further help collate and create a centralized view of data for applications comprising of multiple services, resources and regions.
- Tags for cost allocation
Services like AWS Cost Explorer and detailed billing reports enables you to bifurcate AWS costs by tagging. There are specific tags like cost centre, business unit, customer or project under the business domain, used to correspond AWS costs with traditional cost allocation features. Since cost allocation report can consist of any tag, it enables you to connect costs with technical or security measures, namely, precise applications, environments, or compliance programs.
- Tags for automation
Resource or service-oriented tags help in filtering resources during automation. To get in and out of automated tasks or to pinpoint specific versions of resources to archive, update or delete, automation tags are put to use. For instance, you can run automated scripts and stop development environments from running when not in use, to curb costs.
- Tags to control access
IAM polices enable you to restrict permissions based on specific tags or its values that facilitate support of tag-based scenarios. For example, IAM user permission can control the amount of EC2 API calls to particular environments based on their tags.The same logic can be implemented to restrict API calls to specific Amazon VPC networks. It is important to define and limit which user can have access control is such tag-based conditions.
Additional tagging strategies include –
- Provide a suitable naming system for tags and set the tagging format standards to eliminate any duplications or inconsistencies.
- Plan AWS tagging strategies in line with changing business needs. Review and revise implemented tagging strategies at periodic intervals to stay aligned.
- Administer alerts for any unintended deviations in receiving timely notifications. In addition, keep a check on the number of alerts being sent.
AWS tagging strategies with Cloud Ensure –
With enterprises growing their cloud footprint, it is vital for them to implement robust tagging strategies to function effectively. For better governance, ensure leveraging comprehensive tools like CloudEnsure to create, edit or delete tags, monitor AWS resources and provide alerts and notifications on them.
As part of its cloud management features, CloudEnsure offers AWS tag-specific monitoring and automation, where configuring and mapping tags to the required accounts as well as editing or deleting them are made simple. Tags are usually audited with the actual tags (key-value) pairs to record missing resource tags if any. The tag compliance module of CloudEnsure facilitates automatic application of these missing tags . The user can also create an ITSM ticket for the same.
Fabricating a well-defined AWS tagging strategy that is aligned to business needs will help you manage, identify, organize, search, and filter your AWS resources efficiently. Additionally, evaluate and amend your tagging strategies from time to time to implement them as best practices.