Automated infrastructure activities

Tags can be used in a wide range of automation activities when managing infrastructure. Use of AWS Systems Manager for example will allow you to manage automations and runbooks on resources specified by the defined key-value pair you create. For managed nodes, you could define a set of tags to track or target nodes by operating system and environment, you could then run an update script for all nodes in a group, or review the status of those nodes. Further to this, Systems Manager Resources themselves can also be tagged to further refine and track your automated activities.

Automating the start and stop lifecycle of environment resources can provide a significant cost reduction to any organization. Instance scheduler on AWS is an example of a solution that can start and stop EC2 and RDS instances when they are not required. For example, developer environments utilizing EC2 or RDS instances that are not required to be running on weekends are not utilizing the cost saving potential that the shutting down of those instances can provide. By analyzing the needs of teams and their environments, and properly tagging these resources to automate their management, you can utilize your budget effectively.

An example schedule tag used by instance scheduler on an EC2 instance:

{
    "Tags": [
        {
            "Key": "Schedule",
            "ResourceId": "i-1234567890abcdef8",
            "ResourceType": "instance",
            "Value": "mon-9am-fri-5pm"
        }
    ]
}