Reuse list of CloudFormation tags

Question

I have a rather complex set of CloudFormation templates that I use for provisioning the different environments of our infrastructure. However I recently got the request to tag the created resources with a rather extensive list of tags (like 15).

Hardcoding the tags into each of the template file doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I would rather create the list of tags once and refer to them for every taggeable resource. Problem is: I am not even sure this is possible. Do you know of any way that a reusable list of tags can be achieved?

I want to write this:

ECSAutoScalingGroup:
    Type: AWS::AutoScaling::AutoScalingGroup
    Properties: 
        ...
        Tags: !Ref ElTags

rather than

ECSAutoScalingGroup:
    Type: AWS::AutoScaling::AutoScalingGroup
    Properties: 
        ...
        Tags: !Ref ElTags
            - Key: Name
              Value: !Join ["-", [!Ref EnvironmentName, 'ecs-as-group'] ]
              PropagateAtLaunch: true
            - Key: TEAM
              Value: !Ref TeamName
              PropagateAtLaunch: true

Answer 1

You can easily reuse tags if you don't pass them to the template but instead reference them during deployment. The tags will be propagated to all ressources of the stack. A command similar to the one below might meet your needs:

aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name mystack \
--template-body file://my_template.yaml --tags file://my_tags.json

The file my_tags.json is of the format

[
    {"Key": "mytag", "Value": "val"},
    ...
]

Alternatively, you could deploy your stack through CodePipeline and define the tags in the template configuration