AWS Tagging: Best Practices for Efficient AWS Resource Management
In today’s cloud-driven world, effectively managing AWS resources is crucial for businesses of all sizes. One powerful tool in your AWS management resources is tagging.
This blog post will dive into AWS tagging standards and best practices, helping you optimize your cloud infrastructure and costs.
Tagging Overview
AWS provide the ability to tag resources with descriptive metadata. Tags simplify resource management at scale and will be used for cost allocation. As the Enterprise plans to implement multiple applications, multiple application environments and multiple AWS accounts; tagging must be applied consistently to allow costs to be separated out into applications, environments and business units.
Each tag consists of a key and a value, both of which are user-defined strings. Once defined, tags can be used as a filter when requesting resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, based on tag keys or values. Tags are also reported against in Cost Allocation Reports.
Tags provide identification and classification of AWS resources. Examples of commonly used tags include application identifier, environment, or owner.
Resource Groups
A Resource Group is a collection of AWS resources that share one or more tags. It can span multiple services and be used to create a custom console that organizes and consolidates resources on a per-project basis.
In AWS, a resource is an entity such as an EC2 instance or an S3 bucket. Using the Resource Group tool, you can create custom consoles that organize and consolidate all resources for a specific project in a single view.
For example, all resources for a version of PROJECT_A in production can be in one Resource Group, while resources used for PROJECT_B can be in another.
Compound Tags
There is a limit of 50 tags per resource in AWS, as such it is a good practice to combine several tag keys and values into a single compound tag. For example, rather than creating 3 keys (tags) called OwnerName, OwnerPhone, and OwnerEmail, the 3 keys should be combined into 1 key called OwnerContact, which could contain the compound values of Name, Phone, and Email address using a pipe delimiter.
We will assign the Name Tag as a compound value. We will use the hyphen as a delimiter. An example of the values assigned to the Name Tag are shown in examples section at the end of this document.
Tagging Style Rules
- Tag key names are case-sensitive and can contain mixed-case letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens.
- Tag key names should use upper CamelCase, a convention that combines words/abbreviations by beginning each word with a capital letter such as
MiscMetadataandSupportEndpoints. - Tag values are case-sensitive and should not use the semi-colon (“;”), equal sign (“=”), or pipe (“|”) characters as these are used as delimiters in compound values.
- Compound tag value key names should use Pascal case followed by an equal sign (“=”) such as KeyName1=value1-value2-value3;KeyName2=value1-value2-value3
AWS Terms and Abbreviations
The following terms and abbreviations will be used through this design and implementation of all Enterprise applications.
| Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Database Layer | rds |
| Private | pri |
| Public | pub |
| Management | mgmt |
| Connectivity | conn |
Environment-specific abbreviations are as follows:
| Environments | Value | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Development | dev | Write code for developers |
| Q.A. | qa | Verify Code for QA |
| Staging | stage | Test Infrastructures for product and stakeholders |
| Production | prod | Used by end users |
Tagging Region Codes
AWS regions codes are unique.Therefore, they will be abbreviated as follows:
| Region | Region Code |
|---|---|
| ap-northeast-1 | an1 |
| ap-northeast-2 | an2 |
| ap-south-1 | as1 |
| ap-southeast-1 | ase1 |
| ap-southeast-2 | ase2 |
| ca-central-1 | cc1 |
| eu-central-1 | ec1 |
| eu-west-1 | euw1 |
| eu-west-2 | euw2 |
| sa-east-1 | se1 |
| us-east-1 | ue1 |
| us-east-2 | ue2 |
| us-west-1 | uw1 |
| us-west-2 | uw2 |
Business Tags
These can be used to capture business relevant information and which part of the business is responsible for this resource. Can greatly speed up the elimination process in an event of failure or attack.
| Tag | Description |
|---|---|
| SiloName / BusinessName | Silo / Business are responsible for resource |
| CostCentre | Business group to be billed for the AWS resources |
| PartnerContact | Value contains contact information for external managed services partner Pipe separated John Smith |
Security Tags
To gain full visibility over account surface data, we use these security classification tags in conjunction with Additional Tags to map data classifications across our infrastructure. AWS Config Rules can also be configured to ensure that sensitive data, such as PCI information, is only stored in designated secure areas.
| Tag | Description |
|---|---|
| Compliance | An identifier for workloads designed to adhere to specific compliance e.g. Normal /SOC2/ HIPPA |
| Permissions | An identifier for the specific entity that can modify the resource |
| LastReviewed | Last time this instance was reviewed for compliance -Â YYYY-mm-dd |
| ApprovedVersion | Steps which are taken to approve AMI image |
| ApprovedBy | Department or software which has approved AMI for use in Organization X |
Tagging Limitations
The following basic limitations apply to tags:
- Do not useÂ
AWS:Â or any upper or lowercase combination of such as a prefix for either keys or values. These are reserved only for AWS use. - Each resource can have a maximum of 50 user-created tags.
- Tag keys and values are case sensitive.
- For each resource, each tag key must be unique, and each tag key can have only one value.
- Allowed characters are letters, numbers, spaces representable in UTF-8, and the following characters: _ . : / = + - @.
- A tag key cannot be an empty string. A tag value can be an empty string, but not null.
For more limitation visit here.
Best Practices for AWS Tagging
- Plan your tagging strategy before implementation
- Use automation tools to ensure consistent tagging across your organization
- Regularly review and update your tags
- Educate your team on the importance of proper tagging
- Utilize AWS Config Rules to enforce tagging policies
Conclusion
Implementing a robust AWS tagging strategy is essential for efficient cloud resource management. By following these best practices, you can improve organization, cost allocation, and security across your AWS infrastructure. Remember, effective tagging is an ongoing process - regularly review and refine your approach to maximize its benefits.
Start implementing these AWS tagging best practices today, and watch as your cloud resource management becomes more streamlined and efficient!
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