· Cloud · 2 min read
Advanced FinOps: Tagging Strategies That Actually Save Money
You can't manage what you can't measure. We dive into how a robust resource tagging strategy is the foundation of cloud cost control.
The monthly cloud bill arrives. It’s £50,000. Finance asks: “How much of this was for the new Marketing project?“. You stare at the bill, which just says “EC2 Instances: £30,000,” and you have no idea.
This is why Tagging is the most boring but critical part of FinOps.
The “Must-Have” Tags
Every single resource (VM, Bucket, Database) must have these 3 tags:
- Owner: The email address of the team or person responsible. (e.g.
owner: data-team@company.com). If a resource has no owner, it gets deleted. - Environment:
prod,staging, ordev. This lets you apply policies like “Shut down alldevservers at 7pm”. - CostCenter: The code for the department paying for it.
Automating Compliance
You cannot rely on humans to remember to tag things. You must enforce it:
- Infrastructure as Code: Use Terraform frameworks (like
terratag) to automatically apply tags to everything in the code. - Tag Policies: Use AWS Organisations or Azure Policy to block the deployment of any resource that is missing these tags.
The Payoff
Once your tags are clean, you can generate reports that say: “The Data Team spent £5,000 in Dev last month.” This creates Accountability. When teams see their own costs, they naturally start to optimise.
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