Four tags that every cloud instance should have
For as long as we’ve been a source of cloud cost management strategies and tips, we’ve preached the gospel of tags. They’re a vital tool for enabling cost allocation, chargeback, and in-depth understanding of how the cloud is being leveraged across your company. These are four tags that every cloud instance should have:
#1: Environment
Knowing how your usage breaks out across dev, test, qa and prod provides insight into your spending across environments (should you really be spending that much on test?) and can be vital for optimizing your spending.
Example tags:
environment=dev
environment=prod
#2: Role
The ability to quickly identify what an instance is being used for can go a long way. Should this instance really be running as frequently as it has been? Should we be spending as much as we are to keep this instance running?
Example tags:
role=webserver
role=customerdatabase
#3: Creator/Owner
A little accountability goes a long way. Encourage (or mandate) employees to tag any instance that they spin up with their own name, and efficiency might just magically increase. And if it doesn’t_ you can point fingers with confidence.
Example tags:
owner=steven
creator=luna
#4: Name
The name tag is set by default when an instance is launched, for good reason. The ability to uniquely identify any given instance allows you to allocate spending all the way down to specific instances, associate bandwidth to a tagged resource, and let you use concatenated tags.
Example tags:
name=the_id_of_the_instance_a_volume_is_attached_to
name=the_name_of_the_instance_a_volume_is_attached_to
When we say that these are four tags that every instance should have, we really do mean every instance. Tags are only useful if they’re applied consistently — otherwise, they’ll only provide a partial representation of your spending.
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