AWS Tagging Guidelines for Government Entities: Purpose, Audience, and Best Practices, Exams of Architecture

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Information &

eGovernment

Authority

Governance & Enterprise Architecture Directorate

Version 0. 5 | 23 rd^ August 2021

Standards & Guidelines

for AWS Tagging

Governance & Enterprise Architecture Directorate

• Glossary Table of Contents
• 1. Purpose
• 2. Intended Audience
• 3. Introduction to Tags
• 4. Considerations to Best Practices
• 5. Naming Conventions
  • 5.1 General Naming Guidelines
• 6. Tagging Guidelines
  • 6.1 Cost Allocation
  • 6.2 Automation
  • 6.3 Operations Support
• 7. Feedback and Comments
• 8. References & Useful Resources

Governance & Enterprise Architecture Directorate

1. Purpose

Tagging is a feature on Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment that helps managing

organization’s instances, images, and other Amazon EC2 resources. It allows users to assign their

own metadata to each resource in the form of “tags”.

The purpose of this document is to provide a unified standardization of AWS tags across

government entities in order to facilitate systematic tracking, monitoring and reporting in

different areas such as cost allocation, automation, operations support, access control and

security risk management.

2. Intended Audience

Government users who are directly involved in creating, managing and monitoring AWS

resources.

3. Introduction to Tags

A tag is a label that users can assign to an AWS resource. Each tag consists of a key and value,

both of which users define.

Tags enable users to categorize their AWS resources in different ways, for example, by purpose,

owner, or environment, etc. This is useful when there are many resources of the same type

where users can quickly identify a specific resource based on the tags assigned to it.

Figure (a) shows how tagging simply works. In this

example, the user assigned two tags to each

instance; the first tag with a key indicating

ministry owning the instance “ gob: ministry ”

with value set to “ iga ” for Information and

eGovernment Authority, while the second tag

with a key indicating the type of hosting

environment that the instance runs on, to show

whether it is a testing , production or

development environment.

Figure (a) Basic Tagging Example

Governance & Enterprise Architecture Directorate

4. Considerations to Best Practices

iGA has defined the AWS Tagging Standards based on AWS best practices, which include:

• Usage of a standardized, case-sensitive format for tags.
• Maintaining consistently across all resource types.
• Consideration to tag dimensions that support the ability to manage resource access

control, cost tracking, automation, and organization.

• Implementation of automated tools to help manage resource tags. The Resource Groups

Tagging API enables programmatic control of tags, making it easier to automatically

manage, search, and filter tags and resources. It also simplifies backups of tag data

across all supported services with a single API call per AWS Region.

• Consideration to the implications of future changes of tags, especially in relation to tag-

based access control, automation, or upstream billing reports.

5. Naming Conventions

5.1 General Naming Guidelines

The following basic conventions for tag naming and usage should be considered while dealing

with tags on AWS environment:

• Each resource can have a maximum of 50 tags.
• For each resource, each tag key must be unique, and each tag key can have only one

value.

• The maximum tag key length is 128 Unicode characters in UTF-8.
• The maximum tag value length is 256 Unicode characters in UTF-8.
• Allowed characters can vary by AWS service. For information about what characters you

can use to tag resources in a particular AWS service, see its documentation. In general,

allowed characters in tags are letters, numbers, spaces representable in UTF-8, and the

following characters:. : + = @ _ / - (hyphen).

• In terms of capitalization, iGA has decided to avoid capital letters in tag keys.
• The “aws:” prefix is reserved for AWS use. It is not possible to edit or delete tag keys or

values when the tag has a tag key with the “aws:” prefix. Tags with the “aws:” prefix do

not count against your tags per resource limit.

Governance & Enterprise Architecture Directorate Tag Key Name Applicable Value / Examples department computer-communication-networks workload-name name-of-the-work-load technical-contact-name ahmed-mohamed-ali technical-contact-email [email protected] technical-contact-phone + support-vendor-name name-of-the-vendor support-vendor-contact-name contact-name-of-vendor-support support-vendor-contact-email [email protected] support-vendor-contact-phone +9731234567^8

7. Feedback and Comments

For feedback or any comments, please contact the Policies and Standards Team at iGA by email ([email protected]).

8. References & Useful Resources

• Cloud-First Policy
• AWS Landing Zone
• Government Entities Cost Center (available upon request)