TIL #4: The Golden Rule of Cloud: "No Tag, No Existence"

Tue Jul 29 2025

As we've seen, tags are essential for access governance in Lake Formation. But their importance extends far beyond that. In reality, if a cloud resource has no tags, consider that it doesn't exist for your organization.

Why This Rule? The Consequences of Being "Untagged":

  • Operational Confusion: Impossible to know the resource's owner (the responsible party). Who do you contact in case of an issue? Who is impacted by a change?
  • Financial Chaos (FinOps): Impossible to link cloud spending to a specific service, project, or team. The budget becomes a black box.
  • Security and Compliance Risks: Without clear tags, it's difficult to apply consistent security policies or prove compliance. An untagged resource is a potentially dangerous gray area.
  • Waste: Without an owner, orphaned resources accumulate, leading to unnecessary costs and rampant "Shadow IT."
  • Cleanup Difficulty: Without clear information, planning a cleanup or decommissioning is impossible, leading to an accumulation of technical and financial debt.

The Solution: Two Essential Tags (and Automation)

To avoid this chaos, and to make FinOps and governance natural side effects of your deployments, enforce these simple, mandatory tags on every cloud resource:

  1. Owner: A precise name or an identifier align with the convention of your company. This should be an accountable, contactable individual responsible for the resource (e.g., [email protected] or team-alpha-toto-lead).
  2. Environment: dev, staging, prod (or test, qa, etc.). This is crucial for isolating budgets, applying distinct security policies, and managing deployment pipelines.

Automate Deployment Rejection

The key to making these tags a reality is automation at the entry gate. Implement policies (via AWS Config, Service Control Policies, or rules within your CI/CD) that categorically reject the deployment of any resource that lacks these essential tags.

The Bottom Line: Before even discussing complex cost optimization or advanced governance, simply ensure you can answer two fundamental questions for every dollar spent in the cloud: "Who owns this?" and "Why does this exist?" Tags are your first line of defense and information.