Google Cloud Platform Blog: Using labels to organize Google Cloud Platform resources

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Using labels to organize Google Cloud Platform resources

Friday, October 16, 2015

How do you add a label?

How do you filter with labels?

Common Uses

Label based on team or Cost Center – To distinguish projects owned by different teams. This can be used in cost accounting or budgeting. For example team:marketing, team:research

Label based on component – For example, component:redis, component:frontend

Label based on environment or stage – For example, environment:prod, environment:test

Label based on owner or contact – If there’s an individual who’s responsible for a resource and is the primary contact for the resource

Label based on state – For example, state:inuse, state:readyfordeletion

Elements of a label

A label is a key:value pair that can be attached to a project or a VM

Label keys and non-empty label values can contain lowercase letters, digits and hyphens, must start with a letter, and must end with a letter or digit. The regular expression is [a-z]([-a-z0-9]*[a-z0-9])

The length of labels keys and values is up to 63 characters

There can be a maximum of 64 labels per resource

VM tags you defined in the past will also show up as value-less labels

What about APIs? project labels Setting VM labelsGETread-modify-write$ curl --request POST --header "Authorization: Bearer your-oauth-token" --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{"labels": {"env": "canary"}, "labelFingerprint": "abcdefghij="}' https://www.googleapis.com/compute/beta/projects/your-project-id/zones/your-zone/ instances/your-instance/setLabels { "kind": "compute#operation", "id": "1234567890", … "selfLink": " https://www.googleapis.com/compute/beta/projects/your-project-id/zones/your-zone/ operations/operation-12345678" } Filtering by label in list requests$ curl --header "Authorization: Bearer your-oauth-token" https://www.googleapis.com/compute/beta/projects/your-project-id/zones/your-zone/ instances?filter=%28labels.env+eq+canary%29+%28labels.tier+eq+backend%29 { "items": [ { "name": "vm42" "labels": { "env": "prod", "tier": "backend"Posted by Rae Wang, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform