The Cost Allocation Tag Strategy

Tags drive cost reports. The tag schema that produces useful reports and the enforcement that keeps it consistent.

The schema

Five mandatory tags: team, service, environment, cost-center, owner.

Optional: feature, customer-tier, lifecycle. Add only if used.

Enforcement

IaC linting fails if tags are missing.

Reactive cleanup: anything untagged for 7 days gets a Slack ping to its account owner.

Reports

Per team monthly cost. Per service trend. Per cost center for finance.

Reports are read; that is what justifies the tagging discipline.