Stage 2 · Lesson 3 of 7
Tags and labels for cost
(labels on Google Cloud) are key-value pairs on resources, such as team=payments or env=prod. They carry into billing data so you can group cost by things the cloud does not know about: team, product, , environment. Only resources that support tags get them, and only usage after a tag is applied carries it in most cases.
Keep keys few and values controlled, and apply them from infrastructure code so none are forgotten.
Common trapletting everyone invent their own keys: Team, team and owner_team end up as three columns in your report, each with a third of the cost.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CourseFreeGoogle Cloud cost management courses (Google Skills)
Google Cloud · Beginner
Finish "Understand Your Google Cloud Costs": its labs query billing data in BigQuery
- BookPaidCloud FinOps, 2nd edition (O'Reilly)
O'Reilly Media · Intermediate · Paid book
Paid: the chapters on allocation and tagging strategy explain the reasoning behind a good policy