10 Considerations for tagging strategy for cloud resources

Preparing to tag your resources in cloud should be well thought-through. You have to plan the strategy carefully, as this should reflect your company needs. Here a list of 10 considerations for your tagging strategy for cloud resources.

1 Understand your landscape

You are designing your tagging strategy for your set of resources. Each situation varies, and you should ensure that you reflect.  A few questions that may help in understanding your landscape.

• What do you want to automate with tags?
• What types of resource do you use e.g. VMs, storage etc.?
• What is the technology and services roadmap?

2 Understand your organization needs

The tagging strategy should be tailored for your organization. There may be some things which are commonly used. However, the tags should help your organization in managing your resources in cloud.  Therefore, you should know what are the needs you need to fulfill with tags e.g. cost management per group of resources, automation etc. A few questions that may help in shaping your tagging strategy:

• What challenges do you try to solve with tags?
• What problems do you want to resolve with tags?
• Which structure do you want to reflect in tags e.g. resource owner, business owner etc.
• How complex your cloud model is? Is it e.g. being service provider for other teams?
• What requirements do you want to address with tags?

3 Understand Cloud Service Provide limitation in scope of tags

• Every Cloud Service Provider may have different limits in number of tags you can use per resource. Make sure you check what is the maximum for your case.
• Not all characters are allowed to be used in key-value pair.
• Not all resources support tags.
• Different resources may have different maximum number of characters per tag. This is worth including in the strategy, to avoid unnecessary surprises.
• Check what are the limits in number of characters per name and value. However, there may be also limits in total number of characters for all tags applied per resource.
• Verify if tag key-value pair adheres to case sensitivity.

4 Verification of your tagging strategy

Ensure to include auditing in your tagging strategy. For this purpose, you can use tools from your Cloud Service Provider. For verification you can also prepare your own scripts. Please note, that Cloud Service Provider policies may not only be used for auditing purposes. It is also helpful as enforcement or to append of necessary tags.

5 Consistent tagging strategy

Applying tags should follow certain standards. Tagging will not help you, if you have plenty of deviations. In your convention ensure to include any constraints regarding allowed and maximum characters per tag.

6 Document and communicate tagging strategy

Ensure to clearly describe your tag’s convention. Make your stratgy straightforward and accessible within your organization. Reduce the complexity in tagging strategy, as this should be easy to apply. You can include following information:

• No surprise here, tag name’s list.
• Whenever possible provide definite list of available entries.
• Format of tag value.
• Whether you expect tag’s name and value to be provided lowercase, uppercase etc. Depending if any case sensitive programs will be used later on.
• If tag is mandatory or optional.
• Description of tag itself. Mitigate any confusion, what is the intention of the tag.

7 Do not overdo

Cloud Service Providers allow using many tags per resource. However, try to minimize the total number of tags. If you plan to use too many, it may lead to more confusion than actual benefit.

8 Use cases for your tagging strategy

Try to identify the use cases for using the tags in your organization. Tags can help in:

• Reporting – you can use it for different reports type. E.g. for security compliance purposes, for cost management etc.
• Resource grouping – group the resources by e.g. technology, types, decommission dates, owners etc.
• Automation – tags can help in identifying resources that should be triggered conduct certain actions. E.g. regular starting and stopping VMs, decommission of resources etc.

9 Be consequent

Do not skip adding tags. If you decide to use tags, you should properly enforce the guidelines. This is of course not applicable for the resource which does not support tags.

10 Understand tag structure

It is crucial to know what tag is composed of. This is a combination of name and value pair. You can think of it as a label attached to cloud resources.

A few words

Adequate tagging strategy is really helpful when it comes to establishing proper cloud governance in your organization. This is applicable at different levels from lifecycle management, through automation to reporting and cost allocations. Even though, it is not complex to change tags, it is better to do proper planning. This may minimize time needed for future adjustments. It is always good keep it as simple as possible. Because if it is hard to understand and implement, people won’t use it. I hope this list will help you setting up your tagging strategy.