Azure equivalent of AWS tags?

Question

Is there an equivalent of AWS EC2 tags for Azure? For example, if an account wanted to assign name=value pairs to an Azure machine and then subsequently query them.

Answer 1

Azure doesn't have resource tags. You'd need to implement something on your own e.g. maintain key/value tag list in Table storage (or any other store, really), updating whenever you add/remove a resource. That's something that can be incorporated into CLI/PowerShell scripts, or if you're automating via a program, you can manage tags via SDK calls.

EDIT Oct 2015 My original answer is outdated. Using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for infrastructure deployments, resources may now be tagged. While these may be applied and queried via CLI/PowerShell, you may also manage tags via the portal. When you open a resource, you will see a "tag" icon in the upper-right. Clicking through, you'll see assigned tags and be able to create new ones.

Here's an example of one of my demo resources:

You can also pin a resource tag to the dashboard:

More info on resource tags is here, including instructions for PowerShell and REST API, and a snip from a billing report showing tagged resources.

Answer 2

Azure now supports tagging on preview (new) portal. https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/azure-redis-cache-disaster-recovery-to-azure-tagging-support-elastic-scale-for-sqldb-docdb

Answer 3

Tags are now available in Azure Portal Preview and can be also managed using PowerShell

Using tags to organize your Azure resources : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/resource-group-using-tags/

PowerShell cmlet to manage tags :

• Get-AzureTag
• New-AzureTag
• Remove-AzureTag

Regards

Stanislas