resource-tagging
Resource Tagging
A tag is metadata that answers a question someone will ask later: who owns this, what does it cost, can it be deleted, does it run in production. Most tagging efforts fail not because tags are hard to write but because they're optional — added when someone remembers, skipped under deadline pressure, and drifted from reality within a quarter. A tag that isn't enforced is a suggestion, and a suggestion doesn't survive contact with a deadline.
The payoff for tagging discipline isn't the tags themselves — it's every downstream capability that depends on them: cost allocation, ownership lookup, automated cleanup, and policy scoping all break silently when tags are missing or wrong.
A tag that isn't enforced at creation time will be missing by the time you need it.