For Cloud Optimization, Begin With Better Tagging
One of the most effective means of streamlining costs in an AWS cloud environment is proper resource tagging. Here are some best practices to help you get started.
One of the most effective means of streamlining costs in an AWS cloud environment is proper resource tagging. Here are some best practices to help you get started.
One of the most effective means of streamlining costs in an AWS cloud environment is proper resource tagging. In this blog post, we’re going to look at what’s entailed in tagging AWS resources, how Tenacity can help you do this more effectively, and explain why tagging your resources should be a key component of your cloud cost optimization strategy.
Modern computing environments built around public clouds - such as AWS - can quickly evolve into complex labrinythes of interconnected systems. AWS alone, for instance, bundles together more than 250 different services — ranging from fundamental building blocks such as compute and storage through to Kubernetes orchestrators and other more advanced pieces of the cloud jigsaw.
While AWS contains some built-in cost management functionalities — and Tenacity augments them enormously — it’s difficult if not impossible to get the kind of granular insights into your AWS cost that you can achieve when your resources are sensibly tagged.
Consider — for instance — an AWS billing dashboard that shows your your total spend on S3-class storage. Alone, this doesn’t tell you much about where your storage-associated costs are coming from. In a typical organization with an AWS footprint, these costs could be emanating from:
To add further complexity, consider the fact that AWS is typically utilized to centralize business resources - shifting on-premises computing resources into datacenters that business units, worldwide, can access. For this reason, even the same public cloud can contain resources from different business geographies - as well as teams.
In other words: even storage, as a cost-generator, is far from monolithic. Storage can be spread across different classes and be related to completely unrelated business cases.
In AWS, tagging refers to the process of adding custom user-generated metadata that can be used to pinpoint in a format that makes sense to humans what the resources are ‘doing’. (For AWS’s own guide to tagging resources, see this page).
Each AWS tag consists of two metadata components:
While tagging AWS resources is one way to make the most out of your Tenacity cost optimization dashboard, it’s a good idea to keep the following tips in mind:
Once you have your resources properly tagged in your AWS console, you can achieve more granular cost control:
Listing EC2 resources in a typical organizational dashboard
Using the Tenacity tagging filter, users can quickly filter a long list of resources based upon an assigned tag(s)
By filtering on the key ‘jenkins_server_url’ and its corresponding value, we were able to identify the EC2 instances in this demo dashboard associated with the Jenkins pipeline management tool
By filtering on untagged resources, you can identify potentially unused resources and remediate them in AWS accordingly