Add Custom Tags to your AWS Resources
2017-06-09 by Axel Fontaine
AWS lets you associate useful metadata with your provisioned resources in the form of tags. By default CloudCaptain uses this to consistently tag your AMIs, EBS snapshots, EBS volumes, ELBs, Instances, Auto Scaling Groups, Launch Configurations, RDS databases, RDS snapshots and more.
CloudCaptain does so using a combination of the following tags:
| AWS Tag Name | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
boxfuse:env |
The CloudCaptain environment | prod |
boxfuse:app |
The CloudCaptain application | myuser/myapp |
boxfuse:image |
The CloudCaptain image | myuser/myapp:1.2.3 |
Name |
(For EC2 instances only) The CloudCaptain image and environment | boxfuse myuser/myapp:1.2.3@prod |
Introducing Dead-Easy Custom Tags
In addition to the standard tags automatically created by CloudCaptain you can now also specify one or more custom tags that should be applied to all created AWS resources that CloudCaptain creates.
Typical Uses
Being able to add custom tags is particularly useful in a number of scenarios:
- Cost allocation in your monthly AWS bill
- Creating Resource Groups in the AWS Console
- Automatic use of spot instances with AutoSpotting
And much more!
How it works
For each app in each environment you can now define a set of custom tags that should be added in addition to the existing CloudCaptain ones. To achieve this you can either use the CloudCaptain Console:
Or if you prefer you can also simply use the CloudCaptain client:
> boxfuse cfg myapp -env=prod -tags.team=frontend-dev -tags.spot-enabled=true
And that’s it! All new AWS resources CloudCaptain now provisions in the prod environment for myapp will now receive these
two custom tags in additional to the standard CloudCaptain ones.
Available today
The CloudCaptain support for custom tags is available today at no additional charge on all paid plans. Enjoy!
So if you haven’t already, sign up for your CloudCaptain account now (simply log in with your GitHub id, it’s free), start deploying your application effortlessly to AWS today and have it running with custom tags in minutes.