Define a tagging dictionary - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
Tag template

Define a tagging dictionary

A tagging dictionary is used to establish standards for the tag creation process. Companies that are most effective in their use of tags typically organize their resources along technical, business, and security dimensions. Tagging might include requirements from different stakeholders, such as Finance, IT, the Engineering or Product teams, Security, and Operations.

For example, you can create the technical tag environment-id and then use it to identify the environment where the application is running (development, test, or production). For a list of example tags that you can use as a starting point, see the AWS documentation.

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

  • Tags for cost allocation – These tags are typically business tags. They are used for AWS Cost Explorer and to create detailed billing reports. For example, the tag cost-center-id can be used to identify which cost center will be used for the resource usage.

  • Tags for access control – AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions can be based on tags. You can constrain IAM permissions based on specific tags or tag values. For example, IAM role permissions can include conditions to limit Amazon EC2 API calls to specific environments based on their tags.

  • Tags for automation – Resource-specific tags or service-specific tags are often used to filter resources during automation activities. For example, you can run automated start or stop scripts that turn off development environments during nonbusiness hours to reduce costs.

Tag template

The tag template is part of the tagging dictionary. It establishes which tags will be used in the company. For example, you can create a tag template with the following tags:

  • Technical and business tags: project-id, application-id, layer-id, business-unit-id, cost-center-id, environment-id, and team-name

  • Rightsizing effort: rightsizing-id, sourceinstance-type, destination-instance-type, arn-id

  • Billing tags. aws:createdBy (Anything with the aws: prefix is automatically generated by AWS when cost allocation tags are activated. This is explained in the Using cost allocation tags section.)

In some cases, for more granular information, you need to define a multi-account strategy for organizing your AWS environment and apply tags to control costs and billing based on the structure that you define.