---
title: "Public Cloud Learning Sessions- Tagging Standards for all hyperscalers - 20240123 160135-Meeting Recording"
type: cloud-learning
source-type: video
category: "DevOps & SRE/10_OpenText-Series"
tags:
  - Tagging-Standard
  - AWS
  - Azure
  - GCP
  - FinOps
date-added: 2026-04-14
video-source: "nas:///volume2/work/Public Cloud Learning Sessions/Public Cloud Learning Sessions- Tagging Standards for all hyperscalers - 20240123_160135-Meeting Recording.mp4"
audio-source: ""
status: summarized (Gemini 摘要)
---

# Public Cloud Learning Sessions- Tagging Standards for all hyperscalers - 20240123 160135-Meeting Recording

**Source:** NAS `/volume2/work/Public Cloud Learning Sessions/Public Cloud Learning Sessions- Tagging Standards for all hyperscalers - 20240123_160135-Meeting Recording.mp4`

**Type:** VIDEO | **Category:** 10_OpenText-Series


---

## Open Text Tagging Standards for Hyperscalers

The aim is to establish a tagging standard across all of Open Text to optimize hyperscaler costs (AWS, GCP, and Azure), which are projected to be around $500 million over the next three years. Reducing cloud waste from an industry average of 30% to 15% could save approximately $25 million annually and improve sustainability. A formal finance organization led by Tom Bice is focused on providing reporting across the business, requiring detailed annotation of resources and accounts through tagging.

Tagging is essential for cost allocation, optimization, resource responsibility, and classifying resources (production, labs, customer data). The tagging pipeline involves enabling specific tags for billing in the billing console, which then includes the value of those tags in the cost and usage report (CUR) for reporting via HCMX, Phenops, QuickSight, and Power BI. Consistency in tagging is crucial to avoid ad hoc tag mapping, which is difficult to manage and doesn't compensate for untagged resources. *If we can agree the tags that need to go here, we don't have to do this and we can get out the analysis results.*

The goals of the Open Text tagging standard include supporting key business reporting, applying to all Open Text accounts across all hyperscalers, and being practical for quick implementation. The standard uses the terms tag and account (label and project in GCP). Due to the varying implementations of tagging across hyperscalers, the standard adopts the lowest common denominator, which is GCP's restrictive character set (lowercase, digits, hyphens, and underscores). Many concepts apply at both the account and resource level, using the same tag name and value set. Tags are prefixed with OT_ to differentiate them, with exceptions for existing tags like environment, BU, and cost center, and special cases like name in AWS.

The standard was developed over three months with input from a working group and other contributors and was approved on October 3rd of last year. Tags that are not required are those easily obtained directly for FINOPs or UCMDB collection, such as account, region, hyperscaler, and resource name. Proposed tags include business unit (BU), OT technical contact, cost center, customer, tenant, environment, OT master product, custom fields, platform, cost type, and customer data. The standard is currently on Confluence, and access can be provided if needed.

Implementation involves piloting with product teams to refine the standard and ensure it delivers value in FinOps. Tagging is currently owned by FinOps, with coordination to ensure results and address any issues. A list of product short codes and business units will be maintained in Confluence, backed by Excel, until a proper product hub implementation is available. Future plans include implementing a tagging dictionary and potentially forming a committee to govern the standard. A KPI for tagging, such as 99% of taggable resources being tagged, may be enforced via SCPs or tagging policies.

There's a history of tagging in Micro Focus, with tags specified by the network team for the checkpoint firewall and tags related to the CCRE guardrails. The checkpoint firewall currently references only account number and role, while the CCRE guardrails have a more extensive list. Rationalizing tagging policies and SCPs is ongoing to simplify administration and enforcement. Setting tags is typically done using Terraform, with modules like AWS instance module having a tags parameter. Default tags can be included in the provider definition for easy application across resources. *Typically what you do is almost every module that you've got inside Terraform, so like the AWS instance module there, there's a tags parameter that you could use.*
