Three Strategies to Assign and Track Cloud Resource Ownership at Scale

When an engineer leaves a company, institutional knowledge walks out the door—especially when cloud infrastructure lacks clear ownership records. An EC2 instance or GCP compute resource provisioned years ago may keep running and racking up costs, but nobody remembers why it exists or who requested it.

This scenario repeats across organizations because traditional tagging schemes decay over time: teams merge with incompatible labeling practices, reorgs shuffle responsibilities, and tags become stale. The result is platform teams spending hours excavating Slack logs and hunting down departed colleagues just to determine whether it's safe to decommission a resource.

Query your infrastructure systematically#

The first step is visibility. Cloud inventory platforms like CloudQuery sync resource metadata continuously across AWS, GCP, and Azure into queryable tables. Finding every untagged resource is straightforward—a single SQL query across your entire multi-cloud footprint:

SELECT resource_id, 'aws' AS provider, 'ec2_instance' AS resource_type
FROM aws_ec2_instances
WHERE tags ->> 'owner' IS NULL
UNION ALL
SELECT resource_id, 'gcp', 'compute_instance'
FROM gcp_compute_instances
WHERE labels ->> 'owner' IS NULL
 
 resource_id, , 
 azure_compute_virtual_machines
 tags    
  provider;