Win Friends and Influence DevOps: Continual Tagging Improvement

Links:

• Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management:https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/
• Trash Taxi: https://trash.taxi

Transcript

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Pete Cheslock.

Jesse: I’m Jesse DeRose. [laugh].

Pete: Hashtag #FFF. Not my grades in high school; that is Fridays From the Field.

Jesse: We will make it a thing. It’s going to happen.

Pete: It’s going to happen. We’re going to do our best to use the hashtag triple-F as much as possible. So, if you have any questions for us, just again, reminder, you can go to lastweekinaws.com/QA as we talk more about our Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management. Please give us your feedback, ask us some questions, we’ll answer those in a future episode. Today, we’re expanding on tagging. Because it’s so thrilling to talk about tagging some more, Jesse.

Jesse: We know that you have struggled to fall asleep at night listening to our podcasts. So, we wanted to do a very special episode just for you, to talk more about tagging. Let’s move into our NPR voices. [silky-smooth voice] Hello, and thank you for listening.

Pete: [buttery-smooth voice] Sponsorship of this—no, I’m just kidding. We’re not—we leave that work to, Corey.

Jesse: [laugh].

Pete: So, today is really about how to win friends and influence DevOps, and it’s all about continual tagging improvement.

Jesse: We talked about the importance of tagging, and one of the things that’s really important to tagging is identifying a tagging strategy, and then building and developing that tagging strategy over time. Your tagging strategy is going to change over time; that is the nature of the beast. Your organization is going to change over time, therefore your organization’s needs are going to change over time, and the tagging strategy and the tagging needs are going to change over time, as well.

Pete: Exactly. You’re going to build new products; you’re going to grow, hopefully; you’re going to add additional Amazon accounts; you can make acquisitions; you could get sold to another business. There’s just so many things that are going to happen, they’re going to change. It’s just inevitable. So, how do you continue this process of tagging, and this is, I think, a really important discussion because when you start that process, you take that first step and you start investing in tagging, the best way to get those—you know, that compound interest on all of the return value that you’re putting into tagging, is by making it a long term, continual process. And I’m not talking about, like, “Well, you know, we do a little thing every month, and it’ll be good by, I don’t know, maybe a month or two, next quarter. And then we’ll be done.”

Jesse: [laugh].

Pete: And that doesn’t work. The best companies that we’ve seen that have really knocked this out of the park have turned this into just a multi-year endeavor. It is going to take you a long time to reach just, like, the pinnacle of tagging, having that ability to allocate just down to the penny of your Amazon spend is going to take a long time. So, manage those expectations appropriately that this is not an overnight fix.

Jesse: So ultimately, at this point, you’ve tagged all of your resources; you’ve built this policy. The next thing to really think about is, why? Because in a lot of cases, a lot of engineers are going to ask you this very question. Why should we tag this information? Why should we tag these resources?

And you’re going to need an answer that’s more than just, “Well, finance wants this information,” or, “Product wants this information,” or, “The engineering leadership team wants this information.” What you’re getting at with tagging is cost attribution. So, at a really high level, for those who aren’t familiar, cost attribution is the process of identifying, aggregating, and assigning your AWS spend to your organization’s teams, your business units, your products, however you want to slice-and-dice that data, whatever different tags you might be leveraging within your tagging policy. So, it’s really about where is your AWS spend going, along these different lines of the different things that finance cares about, that engineering cares about, that product cares about, that IT or security cares about. So, it’s not just about tagging your resources so that everything’s tagged, but it’s about leveraging that information to understand, where are your costs going?

Pete: I think that also gives companies a great KPI—Key Performance Indicator for the non-business folks. But it's a good metric. It’s a good way to track your success with tagging is to basically answer this question: what percentage of spend is tagged? Not number of resources because there are some resources that simply don’t have a cost that have the ability to be tagged. So, tracking tagged by a percentage of resources is, for the most, part not useful.

Jesse: Yeah.

Pete: But tracking what percentage of your spend is tagged—and specifically tags that are enabled as cost allocation tags, which is something that you need to make sure you set up—but by tracking that spend, that KPI, that’s how you can start to understand how good of a job you’re doing at this. Now, again, we’re obviously focused on tags as a cost attribution strategy. But the reality is, is that’s the main use of them on Amazon, specifically. The main use of tags, again, that we see is so people can understand where the money’s going.

Jesse: Yeah. AWS even calls them out as user-defined cost allocation tags. For example, if you want to log into Cost Explorer and see where your spend is going among different products, among different teams, among different business units, you need to make sure that those tags that you’re leveraging are enabled as cost allocation tags in Cost Explorer. So, that’s a really important footnote to call out.

Pete: Yet to that point, is if you do enable your cost allocation tags, there’s maybe some default ones that Amazon will enable for you, but you’ll have to enable any of your own customs. Those take effect going forward; they’re not retroactive. So, if you want to understand which tag is costing you a certain amount of money, make sure to go and enable that as soon as you possibly can because it’s not going to—you’re goin...