Comparison
Resource taggingvsZombie resource
Resource tagging
you tried to answer which team spends what and forty percent of the bill was in a bucket labelled untagged.
Attaching structured metadata — owner, service, environment, cost centre — to every resource, so cost and inventory can be grouped by something meaningful. It is the precondition for every other cost practice and it is only achievable by enforcement at creation, since retrospective tagging never finishes. Policy that rejects untagged resources is the difference between a tagging standard and a tagging aspiration.
Full entry →Zombie resource
the unattached disks, the reserved addresses and the load balancer for a service deleted last year are all still billing.
Provisioned resources nobody is using and nobody has noticed, typically left behind when something else was deleted. Storage volumes, snapshots, static addresses, idle balancers and old environments are the usual population, and none of them produce an alert because nothing is wrong. Finding them is a query rather than a project, and the tagging discipline that makes the query possible is the actual work.
Full entry →