Introducing Tag Management

What is tag management?

Tagging is a common word developers often hear among the various software vendors they use across their DevOps toolkit. Heck, it isn’t even limited to just DevOps tools. I also can tag my transactions within my Quicken software. Tagging helps solve for a fundamental problem most people face with data explosion: you can organize sets into logical components.

With my Quicken software, I can tag all my food transactions as “food.” With my Amazon AWS account, I can tag my various EC2 instances by geography, team, project, or even values that help with cost management. Essentially, tagging is designed to help solve for organizing, searching, and filtering data into logic components.

“Essentially, tagging is designed to help solve for organizing, searching, and filtering data into logic components. “

Why does Continuous Delivery need tag management?

As your application environments begin to increase in complexity, so will your CD pipelines. Not only that, your development teams may begin to increase over time, your IT costs and expenses have economic constraints, and you may begin to utilize various strategies for how you spin up or take down various cloud environments. These various strategies require tagging your application components to make it easier to search and filter within Harness. Common examples that we’ve encountered with our customers include:

• Categorizing application components by teams
• Marking components for reuse, preservation, or deletion
• Allocating Costs

What do I mean by “components”? With our new tagging capabilities, you now have the option to tag the following within Harness:

• Services
• Environments
• Workflows
• Pipelines
• Infrastructure Providers

In the future, we plan to add additional capabilities around our new tagging feature. We also plan to extend what you can tag. You can immediately begin building logical models around all the various components within Harness to begin reflecting how your business understands your applications, your development teams, and your strategy behind both.

How does Tagging Work with Harness?

The tagging feature is available within the components supported today. You can always find more information in the product docs.  In this example, I’m showing the configuration screen for a Service:

Simply click on Add Tag and a dialogue box will popup:

You can click on:

• Preexisting tags
• Preexisting values for those tags
• Create new tags
• Or, create new values to tags

You can also limit the values to tags if you’d like. You can access the Tags Management feature by navigating to Setup -> Account -> Tags Management:

You can immediately begin building logical models around all the various components within Harness to begin reflecting how your business understands your applications, your development teams, and your strategy behind both. I hope you enjoy this new feature and that your imagination runs wild with that is possible!

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