Topic: cloud
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Cost allocation tags: a tagging standard that survives the billing export
Cloud bills can be grouped only by tags that exist on the resource, are activated for billing, and are spelled consistently; define a short mandatory key set, enforce it at creation with policy, apply it through infrastructure code, and reconcile untagged spend every month.
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Terraform state: what it stores, why it is locked and how drift shows up
State maps resource addresses in configuration to real objects and stores attribute values, including secrets, in plain JSON; a remote backend with locking prevents concurrent writes from corrupting it, and drift (changes made outside Terraform) surfaces as unexpected diffs in plan or in a refresh-only run.
Machine-readable: JSON