Links:

• Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management:https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/
• AWS Tagging Best Practices Whitepaper: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/tagging-best-practices/welcome.html

Transcript

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Pete Cheslock.

Jesse: I'm Jesse DeRose.

Pete: And we're back again, Jesse. We are back. But really have we gone anywhere to begin with?

Jesse: We've been making our way slowly but surely through this Unconventional Guide. Lots of really interesting recommendations, lots of really interesting feedback from all of you, which we really, really appreciate. We can't wait to dive into some of those ideas deeper in future episodes.

Pete: Yeah. And don't forget, you can give us additional feedback and questions at lastweekinaws.com/QA, feel free to add your name. Or not. Doesn't matter. It can be totally anonymous. That's fine with us. So today, we're talking about a topic that is very near and dear to our hearts. 

Jesse: Yes.

Pete: It is tagging.

Jesse: Yes.

Pete: Tagging your resources in Amazon, or I mean really any cloud provider; any place you can tag something you probably should. And we're going to talk a little bit about strategies for that, how people use their tags, just all the fun things related to it. Tagging, it's easy to do, right, Jesse? You just tag your resources and all your problems go away.

Jesse: Yep. Thanks, everybody, have a good night.

Pete: So yeah, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to—no, I’m just kidding. 

Jesse: [laugh].

Pete: Tagging is probably the thing that most companies are doing poorly, simply because it's hard, and it's an afterthought, and if you didn't have a really solid forced strategy to ensure tags and force compliance, you're probably not going back to fix it.

Jesse: Yeah. It's not thought about as something that's a first-class citizen in the cloud world. When you think about the things that are important to your business model, you might think about getting your application out the door and running, maybe talking about business requirements for availability, failover, data retention, but tagging is nowhere on that list. That's not something that I think any organization thinks about as part of an MVP, let alone future iterations of their products.

Pete: Tagging feels much like the same feeling I get when my doctor says that I should eat more veggies. 

Jesse: Oof.

Pete: I know they're good for me; I know we need to do this. They have vitamins, and fiber, and all these wonderful things. But in order to make those veggies something I want to eat, we have to learn to make it more delicious. Personally, I find duck fat works to make them more delicious. I wish we could apply a duck fat strategy to the tagging problem.

Jesse: Yeah, it's not an easy problem to solve. Or rather, I should say it is an easy problem to solve, but it's not something that anybody is quickly incentivized to solve. Tagging, just for the sake of tagging, it doesn't work.

Pete: Yeah, it's that there really are no incentives for it. No good incentives. It's usually because someone came over to your desk and said, “Hey, what's this charge for? And who's using it? And what's the deal with this?” 

And you're going into Cost Explorer, and you're like, “Uh, I don't know. It's in this one account.” And that's as far as you can go to figure out who did what and why that thing is the way it is.

Jesse: Yeah. There are so many different tagging strategies that we've seen. We've seen some clients talk about tagging as a way to potentially penalize engineers who aren't tagging or who are spending too much money. We've seen organizations who are tagging to reward teams that are tagging all their spend or keeping their spend optimized. Across the board, there are just so many different ways to go about this.

Pete: So let's assume you are like most of the companies that we've seen. Definitely not all: there are some rare gems out there that are making tagging a long term and continual process, which we're actually going to talk about in a future episode, how to do that. But let's say you're just looking at your bill, you're looking at your usage, and you're saying to yourself, “Okay. I need to be better at this.” What do they say, “The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step?” What is that first step?

Jesse: Yeah there's a lot of different ways to go about this. I think there's a couple great places to start. Now, I will say AWS has a thrilling 24-page best practices white paper that we’ll throw a link in the [show notes 00:05:18]. 

Pete: Have you read that, Jesse?

Jesse: I will say that I have read parts of it. I have not read all of it, and so I want to make it very, very clear to all of our listeners, this is not a document that needs to become the holy grail for your organization. I think in the same way that you could read the SRE book from Google and have some good takeaways, you can skim through this white paper, maybe read through a couple of the sections that seem most applicable to your organization, and then start with those ideas, start with those best practices, and then build them over time organically; develop them over time organically.

Pete: I like to read it some nights when I'm just having trouble sleeping, and maybe by page two or three I’m just out.

Jesse: Yeah. There's a lot of content in there talking about what to tag, why to tag. I think the best place for any organization to start is to think about what are the important things that we need to tag. And that's a conversation that's going to involve not just engineers, but also finance, potentially IT, maybe also security teams, depending on how your organization is built. Because ultimately, what you want to do is understand what are the things that my organization cares about when it comes to our cloud usage?&n...