In this article: 

• CloudFormation (stack) tags
• EC2 instance tags
• Custom tags
• AWS Cost Allocation tags

In the process of creating cloud resources using your cloud account, CloudShell Colony automatically tags the infrastructure resources that it creates in your cloud account.

Tags can appear in the cloud provider’s billing report. Using the tags in your billing report, you can easily connect use cases with a cost. For example, measure the cost of performance testing sandboxes or sandboxes deployed by specific users.

In AWS every sandbox is deployed as a separate CloudFormation stack. To tag consistently across all deployed environments, CloudShell Colony tags both the CloudFormation stack and the EC2 instances that are created in the stack with the same out-of-the-box tag.

TheCloudShell Colony tags include:

• colony_space_name
• colony_blueprint_name
• colony_sandbox_name
• colony_owner_email

CloudFormation (stack) Tags

Every sandbox deployed on AWS has a unique name composed of an indication that the sandbox was deployed by CloudShell Colony, followed by the sandbox's identifier, followed by an additional description that was provided by the sandbox owner. This allows you to search and easily find a specific sandbox stack.

To display the tags, select a specific sandbox stack and open the Details pane.

EC2 Instance Tags

CloudShell Colony uses the same out-of-the-box tags for both CloudFormation and EC2 instances.

Custom Tags

You can create your own custom tags in every blueprint. When you launch a sandbox, CloudShell Colony adds both custom and out-of-the-box tags, to the CloudFormation stack and to all relevant EC2 instances.

For more information on adding custom tags to a blueprint see The Blueprints YAML file.

AWS Cost Allocation Tags

You can define which tags to include in your AWS billing report by activating the required tags in AWS's Cost Allocation Tags page.

CloudShell Colony tags will display in AWS’s Cost Allocation Tags page after you begin to launch sandboxes.

It is recommended to activate CloudShell Colony’s out-of-the-box tags and any custom tag you added to your blueprints.

For more information about AWS’s cost allocation tags see Using Cost Allocation Tags.