Tagging

What are tags?

Tags might be the single most useful tool on the AWS platform. Simply put, tags are key-value pairs. The only thing AWS says not to do with tags is store sensitive information in them, because they aren't encrypted. Two main types of tags exist: AWS-generated tags and user-defined tags.

AWS-generated tags are automatically created and maintained by AWS services and will contain metadata that is required or useful for the service to run.

User-defined tags are ones that we can create. They can be optional, or we can implement tagging policies that require tags and restrict their values to certain things. For example, we might restrict tag values if we require each resource to include a department tag that can only be values from a predefined list of company departments. This way, we can easily see which resources belong to which departments.