Best practices for tag design

Scenarios

Tags can be used to manage, categorize, and search for resources. The resources include personnel, finance, and cloud services. Tags can be used to perform the following operations:

• Search for and manage resources.
• Manage costs and cost allocation.
• Automate operations and maintenance (O&M).
• Control access to resources.

Design principles

The following content describes the design principles:

• Mutual exclusivity

  This principle ensures that one resource attribute uses only one tag key. For example, if you have used the tag key owner to represent the owner attribute, you cannot use other tag keys such as own or belonger to represent this attribute again.

• Collective exhaustion

  When you plan resources, you must plan tags and prioritize tag keys. All resources must be bound with planned tag keys and related values. Each key-value pair must be named in a standard format.

  Collective exhaustion is a prerequisite for tag-based resource search, cost allocation, automated O&M, and access control.

• Limited values

  This principle is used to remove excess tag values and retain only core tag values. It simplifies procedures such as resource management, access control, automated O&M, and cost allocation.

• Considering consequences of future changes

  When you plan tags, you must consider the impact of adding or removing tag values that may have in the future. This provides extra flexibility to modify tags.

  When you modify tags, tag-based access control, automated O&M, and related billing reports may change. For corporate or individual business, we recommend that you create business-related tags. This way, you can manage resources based on the tags from technical, business, and security dimensions. When you use automated O&M tools to manage resources and services, you can add automation-specific tags to facilitate automation.

• Simplified design

  This principle allows you to simplify the use of tag keys by creating dimension-specific tag keys during the tag planning stage. It also reduces operation errors caused by excessive tag keys.

Examples

The following table lists the tag naming examples in common dimensions. We recommend that you use lowercase letters to name tags.