Cost Center (cost_center)

• Used to help facilitate automated billing via the Cornell KFS system.
• Any AWS resource with that tag will be billed directly to the provided account number.
• Anything in a Cornell AWS account that is not tagged (or cannot be tagged) will be billed to the Cornell account number associated with the AWS account 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. E.g., If you have an EC2 instance running 24/7 and you set the cost_center tag for that instance on the 15^th day of the billing period, the cost_center will be billed the cost of the EC2 instance starting from that day forward.

Tag key/name: "cost_center"

Tag value formats:

• A seven-character account number. OR
• An 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.

Optional Tags

• "Technical Contact"
  • This should be a netid
• "Functional Contact"
  • This should be a netid
• "Environment"
  • dev
  • test
  • stage
  • prod
  • dev/test (for cases of where a resource is shared by multiple environments, e.g an RDS DB hosting both dev and test schemas)
• "Application"
  • Identifies the software application this Amazon resource supports.
  • Resources used by multiple applications could have a suggested value of “Infrastructure”
  • the application should be in all lowercase

How to enforce tagging

In cloudcheckr: http://support.cloudcheckr.com/reports/cost-reporting/cost-related-tag-reports/.