Labels & Tags

Labels are key-value pairs that you attach to cloud instances to organize, filter, and manage your resources. As your infrastructure grows, labels help you quickly identify which instances belong to which environment, team, or project.

How Labels Work

Each label consists of a key and a value separated by a colon. You can attach multiple labels to a single instance.

Adding Labels

During Instance Creation

1. In the instance creation form, scroll to the Labels section
2. Click Add Label
3. Enter a key and value
4. Repeat for additional labels
5. Complete instance creation as normal

On an Existing Instance

1. Navigate to the instance detail page
2. Click the Labels section or the edit icon
3. Add, modify, or remove labels
4. Save your changes

Filtering by Labels

Use labels to narrow down your instance list in the dashboard:

1. Go to the Cloud Compute instances list
2. Use the label filter to select one or more key-value pairs
3. The list updates to show only matching instances

This is particularly useful when managing dozens or hundreds of instances across multiple projects and environments.

Best Practices

• Be consistent — Decide on a labeling convention early and stick to it across your organization. For example, always use env (not environment or stage).
• Keep keys lowercase — Use lowercase keys with hyphens for readability: cost-center, created-by.
• Use meaningful values — Values like production, staging, and development are more useful than 1, 2, 3.
• Label everything — Apply labels to all instances at creation time. Retroactively labeling resources is tedious.
• Limit the number of keys — A small, well-defined set of label keys (5-10) is easier to manage than dozens of ad-hoc keys.

Example Labeling Strategy

A typical organization might use the following label keys:

Next Steps

• Review the Activity Log to track changes across your labeled resources
• Explore Managing Instances for power controls, snapshots, and resizing
• Set up Networking to configure firewalls and private networks