A proper tagging policy is pivotal in managing thousands of cloud resources. Tags help enterprises to streamline their cloud resources across different teams and business units.
However, there are some restrictions to tagging. Tagging restrictions need to be followed strictly to avoid any serious impact on the business. Tagging restrictions can help businesses trim unnecessary cloud spend. Some of the key restrictions, as cited by Amazon, are:
- Maximum key length of the tag must be limited to 128 Unicode characters
- Maximum value length of the tag must be limited to 256 Unicode characters
- Maximum number of tags per resource must be within ten
Reserved prefix — aws: AWS-assigned tag names and values are automatically assigned to the aws: prefix that a user cannot assign. Note that AWS-assigned tag names do not count towards the tag limit of 10.
User-assigned tag names have the prefixed user: in the Cost Allocation Report
Each key can be used only once for each resource. If any user tries to use the same key twice on the same resource, their request is rejected
A resource cannot be tagged at the time of creation. A separate action is required to perform tagging after the resource is created
It is not possible to backdate the application of a tag
Allowed characters for tagging are letters, white space, and numbers, including special characters like + — =. _ : /
In addition to this resources have to be organized via AWS tagging discipline. The following table has information about all Amazon EC2 resources and the tagging restrictions:
It also enables the users to filter resources based on the tags they add. Here are the key AWS Tagging strategies that must be enforced by technical teams for cost allocation and tracking:
1. Define Mandatory Tags
Each resource must be classified into at least three primary tags.
2. Define Optional Tags
Optional tags can help in identifying the specific owners for the resources.
To achieve optimization, having a detailed tagging strategy on AWS Cloud is paramount. Read more about these effective tagging strategies in detail here.
