AWS is incredibly powerful. Their products are awesome. Their ability to execute is unparallelled.
Their ability to fumble the ball so completely in some areas is also breath taking. Tagging is one of those features.
Here is how I passed 9 AWS certification tests in 14 months. Oddly the practice testing is not the most critical step. All of these steps are needed. Let me know if you try them out and how they work for you.
(a short story inspired by true events)
TLDR: Mere mortals implement best practices for S3 read and write performance, create a million billion s3 objects with their high performance system, try to clean up the really really expensive mess and find themselves in a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.
If you have ever worked with AWS as a developer then you will know what I mean, AWS tools suck. They suck so bad there is an entire industry focused on solving for this pile of suck. For just Infrastructure as Code, for example, there are Terraform, Pulumi and Serverless Framework. AWS is famous for "listening to customers". So what gives? Why do their tools still feel clunky, complex and riddled with infuriating edge cases?
If you have used AWS you know how costs can sneak up on you. I have experience getting a heart stopping bill at a previous startup. With Cyclic I've decided I want to start adding controls and alerts from the start.
I recently found that AWS added Cloud Formation support for Budgets (AWS::Budgets::Budget). You can create a quick budget to to notify you of either actual COST limits or FORECASTED cost limits. Here is a sample Cloud Formation example.