There are a few lessons in life that are worth learning. One of them is establishing a robust naming convention for Azure resources from the start. Many resource names in Azure are immutable once deployed, meaning they cannot be renamed. Getting the name right during the initial deployment is a critical success factor. Now I’m sure that everyone has an opinion on this, but from my experience a good and effective naming convention should align with an organizations structure and be human readable. A common practice is to use a dash separated format that includes key identifiers that are meaningful for your environment. If you get this right and incorporate it with an effective tagging strategy, you’re setting yourself up for future success.
Before going too much further here, I’ll point out that there’s a lot to gain from Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. As it relates to resource naming, there’s no need to be creative. Recommended abbreviations, for Azure resources, have already been thought out by the pros and are available here.
With that out of the way, one of many naming strategies for stitching together an Azure resource naming convention could be including the following:
- Entity Name (Contoso)
- Business Unit (Finance)
- Project (Purchase Request Application)
- Environment (Development)
- Region (Azure East United States)
- Resource Type (Azure SQL Managed Instance)
With above in mind, the Azure resource name would be: contoso-fin-prapp-dev-eastus-sqlmi.
As alluded to before, this is going to vary from organization to organization and may be influenced by other things like subscriptions, billing requirements, projects, and maybe locations. The larger point I’m trying to make is think before you do, because if you don’t you’re going to create a mess for yourself that’s not easily resolvable later. Do your best to not paint yourself into a corner and think it through. More importantly, don’t do it alone. Work with your teams to develop the naming convention so that it works for everyone. By establishing a compliant naming standard, you ensure that:
- You know what a resource is by just looking at it
- Future automations, scripting, and dev ops pipelines have a shot of being manageable
- Troubleshooting, security events monitoring, log monitoring become easier to review and digest
There’s one thing to mention that creates a little bit of a wrinkle in the convention. Some Azure resources just can’t align. For example, Azure Storage Account names must be globally unique, lowercase, and contain no hyphens and there are others resources like this. Don’t panic though, it’s not going to be perfect. Just do what you can when you encounter these.
In summary, investing time in an Azure naming convention helps prevent future technical debt and headaches.
