AWS Cost Allocation Tags are labels on resources that attribute and track cloud costs. Tagging is a prerequisite to assigning cost ownership (e.g. by team/app/cost center) and creating cloud cost accountability.

Tagging AWS resources is a manual process that’s done either when a resource is spun up or during a cost firefighting initiative to understand cost ownership. We figured there had to be a better way and set out to make tagging a seamless part of development pipelines that use GitHub and Terraform.

Once set up, the Tagging Assistant GitHub action will allow you to continuously enforce and maintain your AWS tagging strategy within your Terraform projects. Each GitHub repository can be associated with a catalog key that maps to tag key-value pairs within the Tag Catalog on the Cloudthread App. Adding or changing tag key-value pairs in a Cloudthread’s Tag Catalog entry will generate a tagging update Pull Request each time the action runs, and fail if the appropriate tagging is not in place. An example of such an update is `.tf` build file getting `(locals {tags = …}})` added.

All resources defined via Terraform in the repository will receive the same tags defined via the Tag Catalog.

This is just the start – in the future we’ll create more tagging granularity so that it is possible to tag different provider aliases differently within a single project.

A graphic showing how this works is here:

https://www.cloudthread.io/product/tagging-assistant

Tagging Assistant is free to use and instructions to set it up are in our docs below.

https://docs.cloudthread.io/guides/setting-up-tag-catalog

By installing Tagging Assistant you’ll get access to the free version of Cloudthread’s cost visibility, savings insights, and unit economics features.

Very excited to get feedback! Try it out, let us know what you think, and feel free to reach out directly to [email protected] or by using the chat icon bottom right on the Cloudthread app.