To help you manage your instances, images, and other Amazon EC2 resources, you can
optionally assign your own metadata to each resource in the form ofA tag is a
label that you assign to an AWS resource. Each tag consists of a key and
an optional value, both of which you define. Tags enable you to categorize
your AWS resources in different ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment
Using descriptive hostnames or organizing instances into separate subnets is a messy way to
try and organize resources and lacks the power and flexibility of tagging
Storing information in instance meta-data is possible but you need to retrieve the
information, tags enable you to do this more easily