Thought about this yesterday and wanted to share – **FinOps Friday with Solomon** if you will, maybe I’ll make it a weekly thing on here.
Tagging cloud resources ensures clarity, accountability, and cost optimization across your resources. By defining AND applying consistent tagging, you can quickly identify what a resource is for, who manages it, and how it contributes to your organizational goals. Proper tagging does support automation, strengthens governance, and makes reporting and chargeback seamless.
Start small, your layer at the top is the organization (that’s what shows up on the monthly bill), and narrow your focus down to the next level of granularity, and then narrow down from there. You can generally get great cost allocation if you have a tag for:
1. Functional Unit
2. Application Name
3. Owner
4. Dev, QA, Test, Production
A great example would be R&D Dept has the Batman Application, owned by WayneEnterprises@company.com built in Dev, Test and Production.
The clouds support a ton of tags (like 50), but the real work is getting your organization to accept and apply these 4 tags programmatically on every resource.
Once this is established, you’re not adding your 5th tag to all of the resources, you’re adding it to the system that adds the first 4 tags to the resources.