OCI Tagging Enhances Cloud Governance

Keeping track of cloud resources is a constant challenge. Enterprises move to cloud to reduce operational costs and improve business agility. Many early adopters chose to enable thier business units to deploy infrastructure rapidly to be more agile and service their own customers better. The drawback of this approach is the rapid proliferation of data and application assets across many different cloud accounts and the lack of standards and governance. Costs can also get out of control as there is no central authority to govern usage, and very quick, no one know whats deployed, where and why? 

To help provide better governance over cloud usage and apply the same set of corporate standards to cloud resources as they are applied to on-premises resources, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has introduced a best-practice approach to managing cloud resources using a set of standard tags.

Oracle Standard Tags is a set of tag namespaces that governance administrators can deploy in their tenancy at the click of a button. The namespaces are a collection of most commonly used tags which allow customers to categorize resources to manage costs, improve security & availability and improve the overall cloud  service experience. 

Simply select the Oracle Standard Tag namespaces shown below to make these tags available for assignment across your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) tenancy. 

There are several advantages to deploying and using these tags across your tenancy.

You get a consistent practice of tagging across your tenancy. Most tags in the standard tag set have pre-defined set of values. Therefore, as cloud users apply these tags to their resources, your tag value data is crisp and consistent. No free-form typing of tag values that create data quality issues. 

Cloud users have a seamless experience while applying tags - simply pick a value from the drop down and apply. 

OCI services can use tag data to provide a better service experience.

1. Optimize database deployment with applications. When deploying autonomous databases for a specific application, you can tag the database resource tag Oracle-ApplicationName.Peoplesoft=9.1, thereby informing the service that the database is being deployed for a Peoplesoft application. The service automatically optimizes the database deployment for Peoplesoft application.
2. Provide integration between services based on tag data. For eg. a database / compute resource marked dev/test and having idle CPU over prolonged periods may be flagged in a capacity management service as a potential candidate for downscaling / autoscaling to help manage costs.
3.  Experience with Cloud Support would be greatly improved. Support requests can now be opened right from your OCI cloud console with very little information to be manually inputed. A resource marked 'Production' and 'business critical' via tags provides valuable information to support engineers without repeatedly asking customers to provide that information each time a support request is received.
4. Availabilty of critical applications can improve during service disruption events. Things happen, and when they do you want to make sure your most critical applications are least impacted and restored as quickly as possible. By clearly categorizing your workloads by criticality, end-user count etc, you are able to prioritize recovery efforts, communicate with your customers quickly and with more reliable information.
5. Never miss an important update specific to their deployed resources. Once users apply the 'Oracle-Standard.Owner=<email-address>' tag, they can be directly informed about events that impact that resource.
6. Report on resource by tag. Reporting capabilities within OCI allow customers to report on their resources by application tier, compliance level, data sensitivity, departments, RPO/RTO requirements and many more. While at the same time, you know your reports are reliable since they are based on pre-defined standard values consistent across your cloud tenancy.

The Autonomous Database Dedicated for Fleet Administrators Live Labs workshop has step-by-step instructions for deploying and applying Oracle Standard Tags. 

Overall tagging and namespace management can be better understood by refering to the Tagging documentation in OCI. There is also a special section on standard tags in doc.

In addition, you may talk to your Oracle account team or customer success managers for further guidance on how tagging best practices can become a part of your cloud on-boarding. Happy tagging!