Tags allow enterprises and individuals to identify and categorize their Elastic Compute Service (ECS) resources and simplify the search and management of the resources.
Use scenarios
You can use tags to manage, group, and categorize resources so that you can quickly search for and perform batch operations on the resources. Examples:
- You can add different tags to different environments (such as production environments
and test environments), operating systems (such as Windows Server and Linux), or client
platforms (such as iOS and Android). For example, create the
Test:Server-Windows
tag and add this tag to all Windows ECS instances that are in a test environment. Then, you can find these instances based on the tag and perform batch operations on these instances.Examples of batch operations:
- Replace images to deploy applications.
- Upgrade patches.
- Create security group rules to control network access.
- Use Operation Orchestration Service (OOS) to batch start, stop, or restart ECS instances.
- Use Cloud Assistant to run O&M scripts on multiple ECS instances.
- If you manage teams or projects, you can add tags such as
CostCenter:aliyun
to groups, projects, or departments. Then, you can categorize the objects, and implement itemized billing and cross-authorization based on tags in the Billing Management console.For more information, see the following topics:
Usage notes
- Each tag consists of a key and a value.
- Each tag key must be unique in a resource.
For example, the
city:shanghai
tag is added to an instance. If the instance subsequently has thecity:newyork
tag added, thecity:shanghai
tag is automatically removed from the instance. - Tag information is not shared across regions. For example, tags that are created in the China (Hangzhou) region are invisible to the China (Shanghai) region.
- After you remove a tag from a resource, the system automatically deletes the tag if the tag is not added to other resources.
- For more information about tags, see Best practices for tag design.
Limits
For information about limits and quotas of tags, see the "Tag limits" section in Limits.
Services that support tags
The following table describes Alibaba Cloud services and resources that support tags.
Alibaba Cloud service | Resource | API operation |
---|---|---|
ECS |
|
|
Auto scaling | Scaling groups |
|
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) |
|
|
ApsaraDB for Redis | ApsaraDB for Redis instances |
|
Alibaba Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) | Domain names |
|
Key Management Service (KMS) | Customer master keys (CMKs) |
|
PolarDB | Clusters |
|
Object Storage Service (OSS) | Bucket | Add, delete, modify, or query tags for a bucket: bucket-tagging |
ApsaraDB RDS | ApsaraDB RDS instances |
|
AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL | AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL instances | Query resources based on tags: DescribeDBInstances |
Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) | CEN instances |
|
Smart Access Gateway (SAG) | Cloud Connect Network (CCN) | Query resources based on tags: DescribeCloudConnectNetworks |
OOS |
|