I was working through the Appgate SDP documentation this week, trying to wrap my head around how to better organize our contractors and their various devices, when I stumbled on the tags feature. I had seen the option before but hadn't really grasped its practical use. It turns out you can create dynamic groupings based on almost any attribute.
For example, instead of manually adding each contractor's laptop to a static "Contractors" group, you can create a tag like `user.contractor=true`. Then, any user with that attribute automatically gets the right access policies applied. The same goes for devices—you can tag based on operating system, location, or even if a device is managed or not. This feels like a game-changer for automating access, especially when people or devices change roles frequently.
I'm still learning the best practices for setting this up. I started with a simple test by tagging a few development servers based on their environment type. So far, it seems much cleaner than our old spreadsheet method. Has anyone else used tags extensively? I'm curious about real-world examples, like maybe for temporary project teams or for segmenting access by department in a larger rollout.
Absolutely, tags are the only sane way to handle this once you're past about twenty users. We use them heavily to tie Terraform-managed AWS resources to specific Kubernetes namespaces for our dev teams.
The key I learned the hard way is to keep your tag taxonomy simple and documented from the start. Don't let every team invent their own `env` tag with values like "prod", "production", and "live". Enforce it with policy-as-code or in your provisioning pipeline.
For project teams, we tag both the user and the provisioned resources (like a set of S3 buckets and a database) with something like `project:blue-moon`. The access policy just needs to match the tag. When the project ends, we delete the tag from users and decommission anything with that tag. It kills the manual cleanup chore.
You mentioned contractors - we also tag by `employment_type:contractor` and combine it with a `department:engineering` tag. That way contractors in engineering get access to the dev cluster but not the finance repos, all from their HR attributes syncing over.
Automate everything. Twice.