Why care about tagging

In Organizations without a clear tag policy, naming is left to everyone's goodwill, and inconsistencies quickly result. Your cloud infrastructure will be a mess, preventing you to operate it efficiently, when it comes to paying the bill you will be unable to detect abnormalities.

At first the tags will allow you to simply name your resources. This is level 0. Then it will become handy to find your resources, then to classify them. Their interest should grow and go beyond the purely infra part to be more transversal.

Below a citation of the great : Resource naming and tagging decision guide from Microsoft Azure

• Resource management: Your IT teams will need to quickly locate resources associated with specific workloads, environments, ownership groups, or other important information. Organizing resources is critical to assigning organizational roles and access permissions for resource management.

• Cost management and optimization: Making business groups aware of cloud resource consumption requires IT to understand the resources and workloads each team is using. The following topics are supported by cost-related tags:

• Operations management: Visibility for the operations management team regarding business commitments and SLAs is an important aspect of ongoing operations. To be well-managed, tagging for mission criticality tagging is a requirement.

• Security: Classification of data and security impact is a vital data point for the team, when breaches or other security issues arise. To operate securely, tagging for data classification is required.

• Governance and regulatory compliance: Maintaining consistency across resources helps identify deviation from agreed-upon policies. This governance foundation article demonstrates how one of the patterns below can help when deploying governance practices. Similar patterns are available to evaluate regulatory compliance using tags.

• Automation: In addition to making resources easier for IT to manage, a proper organizational scheme allows you to take advantage of automation as part of resource creation, operational monitoring, and the creation of DevOps processes.

• Workload optimization: Tagging can help identify patterns and resolve broad issues. Tag can also help identify the assets required to support a single workload. Tagging all assets associated with each workload enables deeper analysis of your mission-critical workloads to make sound architectural decisions.