You take tagging for granted. “Wait!”, you say. “I don’t take it for granted!”, I promise that you do. Whether you are a novice cloud operator or a seasoned architect, you take tagging for granted and, you are doing it wrong. How do I know this? Experience. Specifically, your experience. The IT field has not prepared you to set up tagging appropriately, and therefore, you have one audience in mind for your tagging strategy; you. You tagged your environment based on how you logically built your stack to keep track of your resources. Then, you threw in a few other bonus items like an extra key:value pair for what Operating System the machine is running or if it's in your production or staging environment. But, that is just the beginning of the potential insights you can gain with an appropriately tagged environment.
The dream of moving to the cloud typically involves several financial assumptions. These assumptions will vary based on the workloads that you are moving to the cloud but the story usually goes like this.
Admin: “Hey boss, we should move X & Y applications to the cloud.”