A summary of recommendations for tagging resources and other objects in Azure. (See AWS Standard Tagging for AWS tagging.)
Tagging for Cost Tracking
Azure billing at Cornell is automated within KFS, like AWS. With that automation, you are able to customize which KFS account is charged for individual Azure resources by tagging with a "Cost Center" tag.
You can also use CloudCheckr reports to summarize billing data by "Cost Center".
Cost Center Tag
- Is used to facilitate automated billing via the Cornell KFS system.
- Any Azure resource with that tag will be billed directly to the provided KFS account number.
- Anything in a Cornell Azure subscription that is not tagged (or cannot be tagged) will be billed to the Cornell KFS account number associated with the Azure subscription as a whole.
Note that applying the "Cost Center" tag to a resource does not retroactively adjust the billing data for the resource, prior to the tag being set.
Tag key/name: "Cost Center" (single space included between "Cost" and "Center")
Tag value formats:
- A seven-character KFS account number.
OR - A seven-character KFS account number, followed by a hyphen, followed by a sub-account number.
OR - A fully qualified KFS accounting string as outlined here: https://www.dfa.cornell.edu/accounting/chartofaccounts/transactionstring
- Under this scheme, the parts of the accounting string labeled as optional in the link above can be left off, but a total of six hyphens are required.
Tagging Best Practice and Recommendations
- Resource naming and tagging decision guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/cloud-adoption/decision-guides/resource-tagging/
- Use tags to organize your Azure resources: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-group-using-tags
- Which Azure resources support tagging: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/tag-support
- Naming conventions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/best-practices/naming-conventions#organize-resources-with-tags
- Standard optional tags recommended for AWS are also relevant for use in Azure. See AWS Standard Tagging