Best practices and strategies - Tagging AWS Resources and Tag Editor
Best practicesTag naming best practicesCommon tagging strategies

Best practices and strategies

These sections provide information about best practices and strategies when tagging your AWS resources and using Tag Editor.

Tagging best practices

As you create a tagging strategy for AWS resources, follow best practices:

  • Do not add personally identifiable information (PII) or other confidential or sensitive information in tags. Tags are accessible to many AWS services, including billing. Tags are not intended to be used for private or sensitive data.

  • Use a standardized, case-sensitive format for tags, and apply it consistently across all resource types.

  • Consider tag guidelines that support multiple purposes, like managing resource access control, cost tracking, automation, and organization.

  • Use automated tools to help manage resource tags. Tag Editor and the Resource Groups Tagging API enable programmatic control of tags, making it easier to automatically manage, search, and filter tags and resources.

  • Use too many tags rather than too few tags.

  • Remember that it is easy to change tags to accommodate changing business requirements, but consider the consequences of future changes. For example, changing access control tags means you must also update the policies that reference those tags and control access to your resources.

  • You can automatically enforce the tagging standards that your organization chooses to adopt by creating and deploying tag policies using AWS Organizations. Tag policies let you specify tagging rules that define valid key names and the values that are valid for each key. You can choose to only monitor, giving you an opportunity to evaluate and clean up your existing tags. Once your tags are in compliance with your chosen standards, you can then turn on enforcement in the tag policies to prevent non-compliant tags from being created. For more information, see Tag policies in the AWS Organizations User Guide.

Tag naming best practices

These are some best practices and naming conventions that we recommend that you use with your tags.

Key names for AWS tags are case sensitive so ensure that they are used consistently. For example, the tags keys CostCenter and costcenter are different. One tag key might be configured as a cost allocation tag for financial analysis and reporting, and the other tag key might not be configured for the same use.

A number of tags are predefined by AWS or created automatically by various AWS services. Many AWS generated tags use key names that are all lowercase, with hyphens separating words in the name, and prefixes followed by colons to identify the source service for the tag. For example, see the following:

  • aws:ec2spot:fleet-request-id is a tag that identifies the Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Request that launched the instance.

  • aws:cloudformation:stack-name is a tag that identifies the AWS CloudFormation stack that created the resource.

  • elasticbeanstalk:environment-name is a tag that identifies the application that created the resource.

Consider naming your tags using the following rules:

  • Use all lowercase for the words.

  • Use hyphens to separate words.

  • Use a prefix followed by a colon to identify the organization name or abbreviated name.

For example, for a fictitious company named AnyCompany, you might define tags such as:

  • anycompany:cost-center to identify the internal Cost Center code.

  • anycompany:environment-type to identify whether the environment is development, test, or production.

  • anycompany:application-id to identify the application that the resource was created for.

The prefix ensures that tags are clearly recognizable as defined by your organization and not by AWS or a third-party tool that you might be using. Using all lowercase with hyphens for separators avoids confusion about how to capitalize a tag name. For example, anycompany:project-id is simpler to remember than ANYCOMPANY:ProjectID, anycompany:projectID, or Anycompany:ProjectId.

Tag naming limits and requirements

The following basic naming and usage requirements apply to tags:

  • Each resource can have a maximum of 50 user created tags.

  • System created tags that begin with aws: are reserved for AWS use, and do not count against this limit. You can't edit or delete a tag that begins with the aws: prefix.

  • For each resource, each tag key must be unique, and each tag key can have only one value.

  • The tag key must be a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 128 Unicode characters in UTF-8.

  • The tag value must be a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 256 Unicode characters in UTF-8.

  • Allowed characters can vary by AWS service. For information about what characters you can use to tag resources in a particular AWS service, see its documentation. In general, the allowed characters are letters, numbers, spaces representable in UTF-8, and the following characters: _ . : / = + - @.

  • Tag keys and values are case sensitive. As a best practice, decide on a strategy for capitalizing tags, and consistently implement that strategy across all resource types. For example, decide whether to use Costcenter, costcenter, or CostCenter, and use the same convention for all tags. Avoid using similar tags with inconsistent case treatment.

Common tagging strategies

Use the following tagging strategies to help identify and manage AWS resources.

Tags for resource organization

Tags are a good way to organize AWS resources in the AWS Management Console. You can configure tags to be displayed with resources, and can search and filter by tag. With the AWS Resource Groups service, you can create groups of AWS resources based on one or more tags or portions of tags. You can also create groups based on their occurrence in an AWS CloudFormation stack. Using Resource Groups and Tag Editor, you can consolidate and view data for applications that consist of multiple services, resources, and Regions in one place.

Tags for cost allocation

AWS Cost Explorer and detailed billing reports let you break down AWS costs by tag. Typically, you use business tags such as cost center/business unit, customer, or project to associate AWS costs with traditional cost-allocation dimensions. But a cost allocation report can include any tag. This lets you associate costs with technical or security dimensions, such as specific applications, environments, or compliance programs.

For some services, you can use an AWS-generated createdBy tag for cost allocation purposes, to help account for resources that might otherwise go uncategorized. The createdBy tag is available only for supported AWS services and resources. Its value contains data associated with specific API or console events. For more information, see AWS-Generated Cost Allocation Tags in the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide.

Tags for automation

Resource or service-specific tags are often used to filter resources during automation activities. Automation tags are used to opt in or opt out of automated tasks or to identify specific versions of resources to archive, update, or delete. For example, you can run automated start or stop scripts that turn off development environments during nonbusiness hours to reduce costs. In this scenario, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance tags are a simple way to identify instances to opt out of this action. For scripts that find and delete stale, out-of-date, or rolling Amazon EBS snapshots, snapshot tags can add an extra dimension of search criteria.

Tags for access control

IAM policies support tag-based conditions, letting you constrain IAM permissions based on specific tags or tag values. For example, IAM user or role permissions can include conditions to limit EC2 API calls to specific environments (such as development, test, or production) based on their tags. The same strategy can be used to limit API calls to specific Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) networks. Support for tag-based, resource-level IAM permissions is service specific. When you use tag-based conditions for access control, be sure to define and restrict who can modify the tags. For more information about using tags to control API access to AWS resources, see AWS services that work with IAM in the IAM User Guide.

Tagging governance

An effective tagging strategy uses standardized tags and applies them consistently and programmatically across AWS resources. You can use both reactive and proactive approaches for governing tags in your AWS environment.

  • Reactive governance is for finding resources that are not properly tagged using tools such as the Resource Groups Tagging API, AWS Config Rules, and custom scripts. To find resources manually, you can use Tag Editor and detailed billing reports.

  • Proactive governance uses tools such as AWS CloudFormation, Service Catalog, tag policies in AWS Organizations, or IAM resource-level permissions to ensure standardized tags are consistently applied at resource creation.

    For example, you can use the AWS CloudFormation Resource Tags property to apply tags to resource types. In Service Catalog, you can add portfolio and product tags that are combined and applied to a product automatically when it is launched. More rigorous forms of proactive governance include automated tasks. For example, you can use the Resource Groups Tagging API to search an AWS environment’s tags, or run scripts to quarantine or delete improperly tagged resources.