Ask a team of cloud engineers to compile a list of things they love and it’s unlikely that you will find cloud tagging on that list. No surprise there really – tagging feels like a dull admin task that just ‘has to be done’, or maybe ‘should be done’.
But dig a bit deeper and you will hear that it takes too long, distracts from valuable development time, and is impossible to keep accurate.
It’s not that the engineers mind applying tags. Good engineers automate it as part of the cloud resource creation process. They understand the value of good tags. Many organisations have an agreed set of tags to apply.
The frustration starts when they go to set a tag value. What should they set it to? Who can give them the answer?
So who should it be?
Is it their manager, the product owner, the project manager? Is it the operations team? Is it the business owner? The problem is that the answer can change from project to project, or between departments. Finding the right person takes more time than creating the tag. Once you find that person, they may not be sure either! Emails, calls, meetings follow quickly. Before you know it hours have been spent on something that should have taken seconds.
How Keytag can help
At Keytag we take the approach that nobody should have to wait for the tag value – it should be there waiting for you, take a second to access, and show the explicit value so that there are no typos or misunderstandings. It reduces frustration and gives the team every opportunity to (and no excuse not to) follow tagging policies.
And it saves a lot of time.
