Understanding the Limitations of Platforms and Ensuring Tags Are Future-Proof

Limitations

If you have or are planning to have a multi-cloud environment, it is important to be mindful of the tagging limitations of each cloud platform, such as capitalization, character lengths or the character types that are allowed. It’s important to create tags that will work for all your environments.

Global Policy

If your organization has cloud environments across the globe, it is important to ensure that tags can work across all regions. Take note here of characters which might be used, the standardization of dates and times zones. This is important as it will allow you to analyze your global data as a whole.

Future Proof

Your cloud tagging strategy should be as future-proof as possible. If today you are only using Azure but you have a plan to use Google Cloud in the future, then you need to consider this when building your tags. Each platform has its own tagging standards and limitations, for example tags within Google Cloud must be in lowercase, so be aware of your future platforms when creating your tags or you could end up with a fragmented tagging strategy and siloed reporting.

Keep it simple and compatible. Using only lowercase alphanumeric characters for tag keys and values in all cloud platforms will mitigate most of the risks.

Tagging Policy and Documentation

Tagging Policy

Although it may be the stakeholders that create the tagging standards, the actual implementation rests upon those who are creating the resources. Therefore, a clear tagging policy is needed to define tagging rules and best practices to mandate how tags are standardized, for example:

• Capitalization standards
• Whether to use country codes
• How to write dates
• How to write times
• Owner/name format e.g. first name, last name, or email address

This information should be shared throughout the company.

Tagging Documentation

It is also best practice to fully document your tagging decisions. Stakeholders should be able to clearly articulate the need for each tag. Each tag should have a tag owner, this individual should be able to articulate why the tag is needed and the value which it brings to the business. This information should be clearly documented in case that individual should leave the business. Documentation should also outline the appropriate values that can be given to a tag. This documentation should also be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that all tags are still useful. 

Staged Implementation 

INow that you have all the information in place, you can begin to add tags to your cloud resources. So where do you start? When looking to implement cloud tags it is important to remember that they are not retroactive and you can only report against them from the moment they have been added to a resource. We therefore recommended that if your cloud resources are already deployed then you start by implementing a small number of highly-important tags and once these tags have been applied to the whole estate go back and add more. Some tags that you may choose to start with include:
• Who is this resource for e.g. dept = marketing
• What product e.g. product = salesforce
• Who owns the resource owner = jane brown