Tags are key/value pairs that can be attached to AWS resources.

.: that means that they don’t actually do anything, they’re purely for labeling purposes and helps organizing AWS resources.

Tagging allows the user to assign her own (words/phrases/labels) metadata to each resource in the form of tags.

Tags don’t have any semantic meaning to the resources it is assigned and are interpreted strictly as a string of characters.

Tags can

1. Help managing AWS resources & services for e.g. instances, images, security groups etc.

2. Help categorize AWS resources in different ways, for e.g., by purpose, owner (Developer, Finance etc), or environment (DEV, TEST, PROD etc).

3. Help search and filter the resources.

4. Be used as a mechanism to organize resource costs on the cost allocation report.

Tags are not automatically assigned to your resources, however are (sometimes) inherited for e.g. services such as Auto Scaling, Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation can create other resources, such as RDS or EC2 instances, and usually tag that resource with a reference to itself. These tags do count toward the total tag limit for a resource

Tags can be defined using the

1. AWS Management Console,

2. AWS CLI

3. Amazon API.

Tags can be assigned only to resources that already exist and cannot be assigned when you create a resource; for e.g., when you use the run-instances AWS CLI command.

However, when using the AWS Management console, some resource creation screens enable you to specify tags which are applied immediately after the resource is created.

Each tag consists of a key and value

1. Key and an optional value, both of which are user controlled.

2. Defining a new tag that has the same key as an existing tag on that resource, the new value overwrites the old value.

3. Keys and values can be edited, removed from a resource at any time.

4. Value can be defined as an empty string, but can’t be set to null.

IAM allows you the ability to control which users in your AWS account have permission to create, edit, or delete tags.

Common examples of tags are Environment, Application, Owner, Cost Center, Purpose, Stack etc.

Maximum number of tags per resource – 50

Maximum key length – 128 Unicode characters in UTF-8

Maximum value length – 256 Unicode characters in UTF-8

Tag keys and values are case sensitive.

Do not use the aws: prefix in the tag names or values because it is reserved for AWS use. Tags with this prefix can’t be edited or deleted and they do not count against the tags per resource limit.

Tags allowed characters are: letters, spaces, and numbers representable in UTF-8, plus the following special characters: + – = . _ : / @.

AWS does not enforce any tagging naming conventions and can be used as per the user convenience.

As the number of tags allows per resource are limited, Complex Tagging can be used for e.g. keyName = value1|value2|value3 or keyName = key1|value1;key2|value2

For tags on EC2 instances, instances can’t terminate, stop, or delete a resource based solely on its tags; the resource identifier must be specified

Public or shared resources can be tagged, but the tags assigned are available only to the AWS account and not to the other accounts sharing the resource.

All resources can’t be tagged, and some can only be tagged using API actions or the command line.

Resources with tagging restrictions of None can be tagged with API actions, the CLI, and the console.

Tags can be used as a mechanism to organize the resource costs on the cost allocation report.

Cost allocation tags can be used to categorize and track the AWS costs.

When tags are applied to AWS resources such as EC2 instances or S3 buckets are activated in the billing console, AWS generates a cost allocation report as a (CSV file) with the usage and costs aggregated by active tags.

Tags can be applied so that they represent business categories (such as cost centers, application names, or owners) to organize costs across multiple services.

Cost allocation report includes all of the AWS costs for each billing period and includes both tagged and untagged resources.

Tags can also be used to filter views in Cost Explorer.