Azure Naming Conventions

Most Admins are aware why we should use a standardized naming convention across all your resources, but sometimes we have to explain it to business members or new admins that have not considered this before. It can be a contentious topic sometimes, but Microsoft Docs guides us through this process with exceptional detail.

Microsoft recently released their updated naming conventions here:
Recommended Naming and Tagging Conventions

As a goal, every organization should ideally decide upon and use a standard method of naming their IT resources from switches, racks, and PDU’s to physical servers, storage arrays, down to virtual machines, virtual networks, and all other cloud resources. This will allow your teams (no matter how big or small) to easily identify the resource and hopefully have a good idea how and where to access it for maintenance or configuration needs.

Now, I’m going to go a bit further down that thought process and say that this discussion presents organizations an excellent opportunity to also define resource naming to include other things such as Active Directory groups and service accounts. You can include so many items in here as categories that I just can’t list them all; but things such as SQL databases, a designation for SQL PaaS should be included in your list . There are so many Admins that inherit a ‘less than clean’ organization and face the monumental challenge of cleaning it up…of course we all wish for just a few more hours in the day to make that cleanup happen. This is preventable and can be fixed!

Let’s take a quick look at some naming examples. I tend to lean towards a 12 character limit, but if you are not restricted in your requirements a more descriptive name is almost always better.

On Premises Naming Examples

Country – City – Resource Type – Operating System or ID Code – Number
= USTAMVMWIN01 -USA, Tampa, Virtual Machine, Windows, 01
= CATORSWCIS01 – Canada, Toronto, Switch, Cisco, 01
=USTAMRACK01 – USA, Tampa, Rack, 01

Dealing with more than one location in a city?
=USTAMEVMWIN1 – USA, Tampa East, Virtual Machine, Windows, 1
=CATORWSWHP3 – Canada, Toronto West, Switch, HP, 3

Cloud Naming Examples

Using a similar requirement for cloud resources, we add a bit from Azure resource descriptions in the recommended naming conventions. It’s a lot harder to stay at 12 characters in cloud, but it’s also unlikely we will see a restriction or requirement for that in the case of Azure.

Resource Type – Region – Purpose or Group – Operating System or App Group – Number
=RGE2PRODERP01 – Resource group, EastUS2, production, ERP, 01
=VNETCCDEVWEB01 – Virtual network, Canada Central, Dev, Web, 01

I’ve seen a lot of different ideas when it comes to standardized naming and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s less about what your business decides on, and more about deciding on one at all. If it is not defined, how can you measure compliance?

If we strive for improvement in the systems that we work with, we will always be able to hand over the reigns with confidence and feel good about the results that we leave behind. If you are facing a challenging environment, remember to break down your work into bite-sized tasks that both you and your team can accomplish. This will help you to feel good about the impact you’re having!

Write down the methods and definitions of items such as naming conventions for your business — and get key members to agree on it. It doesn’t have to be a business policy, but now your team can follow some guidance and measure this as a standard.