Cloud Tagging and Labeling on Azure, AWS and GCP – (Cheat Sheet 2022)

Are you looking for Azure tag requirements, AWS tagging documentation or you want to know how to use GCP labels? You have come to the right place!

In this post, we want to give you an overview of how different cloud platforms handle tags or labels.

You can see this as a cheat sheet to help you navigate the cloud tagging or labeling specifics of Azure, AWS, and GCP.

This post will go into detail on questions like:

• "How many characters can a tag have in Azure?",
• "How many tags can be assigned to one resource in GCP?" or
• "What characters are not supported for tags in AWS?".

So let’s dive right in!

Using Tags in Azure

Here’s what you need to know to get started with tagging in Azure:

• A resource does not inherit tags hierarchically from the respective resource group
• You can assign up to 50 tags to a single resource. If you need more, there is a little trick to add more: Creating tags with multiple values is a valid workaround.
• The maximum key length in Azure is 512. For values it’s 256.
• Tags in Azure are not case-sensitive
• With tag keys you must not use the characters: < > % & / ?

How tags work with AWS

These are the AWS tagging specifications you need to follow:

• You can assign 50 tags per resource
• Tag keys must be unique for each resource and can only have one value
• The character limit for keys is 128, for values it’s 256
• You can use the allowed characters across all AWS services: letters, numbers, and spaces representable in UTF-8, and the following characters: + – = . _ : / @
• EC2 allows for any character in its tags
• Tag keys and values are case-sensitive
• The aws: prefix is reserved for AWS use. If a tag has a tag key with this prefix, then you can’t edit or delete the tag’s key or value. Tags with the aws: prefix do not count against your tags per resource limit.

Tagging with GCP

First: Google calls its tags in GCP "labels" – they are still tags though.

Let’s see what requirements and restrictions GCP labels have:

• A resource can have up to 64 labels assigned to it
• Both keys and values have a maximum length of 63 characters
• Keys and values can contain: lowercase letters, numeric characters, underscores and hyphens
• You are able to use international characters
• Label keys must start with a lowercase letter
• Label keys cannot be empty

Cloud Tagging At a Glance

Constraint/Platform	Azure	AWS	GCP
Max. # of tags	50	50	64
Max. tag name length	512	128	63
Max. tag value length	256	256	63
Case sensitive?	no	yes	yes
Allowed characters	< > % & / ? are not allowed	letters, numbers, spaces, and + – = . _ : / @	lowercase, numbers, underscore, hyphens

meshcloud offers a global management of tags in multi cloud architectures and makes sure they comply with the specific platform requirements.

To learn more about the meshcloud platform, please get in touch with our sales team or book a demo with one of our product experts. We’re looking forward to get in touch with you.