Links:
Unconventional Guide to AWS Cost Management:https://www.duckbillgroup.com/resources/unconventional-guide-to-aws-cost-management/

Trash Taxi: https://trash.taxi

TranscriptCorey: 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