Chapter 10. Pushing back against the chaos: using resource tags
While following along with the lab exercises in previous chapters, you’ve likely been through the steps for launching an EC2 instance at least a few times. With a little luck, you’ve also gotten yourself tangled up in the process once or twice so that “a few times” really means “I lost count after a dozen.” Failure, as I never tire of reminding myself, is our friend.
Having been through the drill so often, you may be wondering about that Add Tags page I keep skipping over, mumbling excuses like “We’ll get back to that a bit later.” Well, “a bit later” just called: it’s for you.
As you probably already figured out on your own, tags are key/value pairs that can be associated with individual pieces of AWS infrastructure. A key/value pair, by the way, is a couple of text strings used to help identify an object’s purpose and context. A key called name might, when associated with a new EC2 instance you’re launching, be given the value MyNewEC2Instance—to set it apart from your old EC2 instance, whose value for name might have been something like MyFirstEC2Instance. This label is used only for identification purposes and has no impact on the way the instance will operate. Unlike other key/value pair systems, AWS keys don’t need to be unique.