GorillaStack Presents: Auto Tag for Cloud Cost Allocation

At GorillaStack, we are obsessed with making everything to do with your cloud easier. A big part of the cloud cost management challenge is cost allocation. A common strategy to deal with this problem is to tag/label your resources with the creator of that resource, the principle being that this will increase accountability within your team and simplify cost allocation at the end of the month. Simple in theory but tricky in practice.

Amazon Web Services have a broad array of products. As a result, it is a real challenge to get your human resources to a) remember to and b) correctly label every EC2 instance, S3 bucket, EMR cluster that they create. Fundamentally they shouldn’t have to.

Enter Auto Tag. Automatically tag your AWS resources with their creator after they are created.

The process is simple:

1. For each account, CloudTrail writes all API activity to log files in a shared S3 bucket
2. The Auto Tag lambda function filters to resource creation events and tags the appropriate resource on the source account
3. Set up the provided policy for the Lambda function’s execution role
4. On each account, set up the provided policy for Auto Tag to assume (to perform tagging)

To get started, see our GitHub repository.

This is just one step we are taking towards making your cloud a better place. GorillaStack is here to help you save time and money in the AWS cloud.

• To find out how you can use GorillaStack to automatically cycle your EC2 instances on and off, check out our EC2 Scheduling rule.
• If you’re interested in taking greater control over your auto scaling groups, you’ll want to take a look at our Auto Scaling Scheduling rule.
• We have a great solution for you to set up AWS billing Alerts to avoid those nasty surprises.

9th May 2016 – we’ve now added a bunch of enhancements including a CloudFormation template to make it even easier to get started – read more about it here