Chapter 12. Tags, Labels, and Accounts, Oh My!
In the previous chapter, we discussed why cost allocation is essential for FinOps. Whether it’s done via tags, accounts, folders, or labels (or more likely a combination of all of these), cost allocation is the building block for all other FinOps capabilities.
Without a consistent allocation strategy, you end up with large chunks of unallocated costs with no way to split them up or to identify which team is responsible. How can everyone take accountability for their cloud spend (principle 3) if they can’t easily see what it is?
The principal mechanisms for allocating cloud cost are dividing usage into:
AWS accounts, Google Cloud projects, Azure subscriptions or resource groups, or one of the cloud-specific meta-groupings of constructs such as AWS Organizations, Azure management groups, or Google Cloud folders. These provide the cleanest and most easily enforced cost allocation definition, but lack granularity and flexibility.
Resource-level metadata-like tags (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) or labels (Google Cloud only). These provide granular resource-level key/value pairs that provide deeper context for usage and billing data, but require efforts at runtime or later cleanup.
Throughout this chapter, we’ll cover the core mechanisms for allocating costs and how they each contribute to cost allocation, and we’ll describe successful strategies we have seen implemented at scale.
Note
Cloud providers use different terms for similar concepts: ...
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