Who Left This Tupperware in the Fridge? Unpacking the Hidden Costs of Poor Tagging

𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙠𝙞𝙩𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙩𝙚𝙖𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙨 𝙪𝙨 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙊𝙥𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙣 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙢𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙠... 𝙚𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙖𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙖𝙜𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙜.

Anyone who's ever worked in a building with a shared breakroom fridge knows exactly where this is going.

You open the fridge, looking for your lunch, and instead, you find 27 Tupperware containers, half-empty soda bottles, and a suspicious-looking curry from Who-knows-when. There are no labels, no dates, and no idea who owns what.

Sound familiar?

Now, imagine that the fridge is your cloud environment.

Every unlabeled Tupperware container? That's a compute instance, a storage volume, or a database spun up during a sprint… and forgotten. There are no tags, no tracking, just a silent budget burn.

This is precisely what happens when organizations overlook cloud tagging. It's not just a nice-to-have:It's the digital equivalent of putting your name and date on your lunch.

Without it, there's no accountability, visibility, and a lot of waste.

According to a 2022 CloudSaver report, 86% of cloud organizations underutilized tagging. That number might have improved, but from what I see? Tagging remains a blind spot in many FinOps strategies.

And here's the kicker: Tagging is only the beginning.

The real power comes when you layer context on top of it:

• Who owns this service?

• What product or customer does it support?

• Is it a shared infrastructure?

• Is it still needed?

That's where FinOps starts to shine when you move from raw data to decision-ready context.

We're building tools today that live in those blind spots, where visibility fades, costs quietly balloon, and the mess starts to smell (just like that fridge).

From a practical standpoint, I distill FinOps in the cloud down to three essentials:

1. Context – Know what you're paying for

2. Correlation – Understand how resources connect to business outcomes

3. Clarity – Spot what's needed and cut what's not

Tagging helps with the first.

Innovative architecture and context-driven analysis power the second and third.

And if you're wondering about a silent cost killer, look no further than data egress.

It adds up fast, especially when architectures aren't built with data locality or Direct Connect in mind. The same applies to compute: not just "right-sizing," but choosing the right engine for the job.

So the next time you open your cloud dashboard, ask yourself:

"Who left this Tupperware in the fridge?"

And more importantly—"What's it costing us?"