tags in azure

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Good morning,

Cherokee is explaining Azure Resource groups in AZ-900. How do tags help organize groups into a taxonomy as the microsoft definition states? I'm kinda lost on this topic. I've watched the episode a couple of times, but I'm lost seeing how tags help control access.

Hey @John-DeWilde,

Tags help organize resources by allowing us to assign key=value pairs to resources.

For example, I can assign tags based on department. All resources that sales uses get a tag of "Dept=Sales", and all resources that Marketing uses get a tag of "Dept=Markteting"

You can create your own "taxonomy", whatever works for your company. Maybe you would rather tag resources based on geography. You could also do both, Dept and geography.

Tags are most useful when viewing resources, creating reports, and for billing. They are not used to control access to resources. For that we use RBAC, and IAM.

Hope this helps,

Thank you Mike, but I'm still not clear on it. So, tags just organize what people/departments can see?

@John-DeWilde ,

In large organizations, resources might be billed to a particular departments budget. So I need to track all of the resources that each department is using. An easy way to do that is with tags.

For example, every time the dev department spins up a new VM, those VMs are tagged with the dept=dev. Marketing has a storage account for graphics and other marketing assets. That storage account is tagged dept=marketing.

When I need to run a report or generate an invoice for the marketing department, I don't have to try and figure out what Azure resources they are using. In the portal, I can go to Tags, and show all resources with the tag dept=marketing.

Tags are even more useful in PowerShell or Azure CLI.. I can return lists of resources where tag=value. Maybe I want to run something against some VMs. Not all of them, just the ones that are being used in a test environment. If I apply tags to VMs, like env=test, env=dev, env=production, I can differentiate between the VMs easily using those tags.

So yes, it is all about organizing resources. As you grow, your Azure subscription might contain 10k, 100k, or more objects. Tags make it easier to organize and work with those objects.

Smaller organizations might not have any use for tags. I don't use them in my demo environment. They are optional.

Does that help?

Kinda sorta. I guess i need some hands on usage because it's not really sinking it. i'll have to look through the labs at microsoft to see if there is anything that can help me.