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Tagging & Naming Conventions

Consistent labeling and tagging is a critical practice in Infrastructure as Code (IaC), enabling better resource organization, cost tracking, compliance, and automation across cloud environments. At Ananta Cloud, we enforce a standardized tagging strategy across all prebuilt and custom IaC modules to ensure every deployed resource is easily identifiable and traceable.

Our approach ensures that each resource includes a core set of labels — such as environment, project, owner, and cost center — along with provider-specific metadata. These tags help teams manage infrastructure more effectively, integrate with governance tools, and align with organizational policies for security and accountability.

To maintain clarity and consistency, we recommend adopting clear naming conventions for tags and labels across your cloud resources:

  • Environment: Use standardized short names such as dev, staging, prod, or qa to easily distinguish deployment stages.
  • Project or Application: Use lowercase, hyphen-separated names like ananta-core, payment-service, or web-frontend.
  • Owner or Team: Use consistent team names or identifiers, for example team-devops, team-data, or team-security.
  • Cost Center: Use formal cost center codes provided by your finance department, e.g., CC-1234 or FIN-5678.
  • Lifecycle or Managed By: Indicate whether a resource is managed manually or automated (manual, terraform, ananta).
  • Compliance Tags: Include tags like pci_compliant=true or gdpr_scope=yes to identify regulatory boundaries.
  • Region or Zone: Add geographic identifiers like us-east-1, eu-west-2, or asia-south1 for location-based resource management.

Additional Best Practices:​

  • Use lowercase letters and avoid spaces: This prevents issues with case sensitivity and improves script compatibility.
  • Limit tag key and value length: Most cloud providers have character limits (usually 128 characters for keys and 256 for values).
  • Avoid special characters: Stick to alphanumeric, dashes (-), and underscores (_) to maintain compatibility.
  • Document your tag policy: Ensure your team has a clear reference guide to tag usage and conventions.
  • Automate tagging: Embed tag application in your IaC modules to enforce consistency and reduce human error.