Establishing Governance with Tagging

Organizing resources in a meaningful way helps IT teams understand cost spending and overall usage patterns of even the most complex workloads, and this organization of resources can be achieved by leveraging a simple concept called tags. This section covers tagging in depth, as well as discussing some essential best practices and strategies to keep in mind when it comes to tagging resources in your own AWS cloud.

So, what are tags? Tags are key-value pairs of metadata that help identify resources in your AWS account. Each tag’s key is a unique identifier and each key can have only one value associated with it. You can create tags and assign them to almost all AWS resources that you create throughout your AWS accounts, including IAM users, roles, EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 buckets, and so on and so forth. The most important tagging feature that AWS provides specifically for cost management is AWS cost allocation tags.

A cost allocation...