Azure Cloud Naming Conventions

The Last few years I have worked more heavily on creating cool stuff in the Azure cloud.

One problem when working in an enterprise company is that there is a lot of people (developers, devop's and operation engineers) is allowed to create their own services and solutions, and this can be very messy if you don't have any convention's.

So the main purpose of naming conventions in Azure is to get a better way to navigate and maintain system and services hosted on Azure. This will also get a more detailed and clear overview in regards to billing and usages of their services.

Me and my team have made the following naming conventions, that is used for services in all environments on Azure: 

{Environment}-{Purpose}-{component}-{geographic zone}-{datacentre}-{company}-{service} 

This gives the following abbreviation naming pattern: 
{prd|stg|tst|dev}-{Purpose}-{dvc|pdt|plc}-{us|eu|ap}-{e|w|n|s}-{wdx}-{rg|asp|tm|ws|sql|st} 

Note:It is not all azure services that is able to follow the naming pattern. There are services that do not accept “-“, for example the azure storage accounts. The last example shows how the pattern would looks like without “-“.

Examples

·         prd-dvc-eu-n-wdx-asp is a app hosting plan for the production environment for the dvc project (dvc is an abbreviation of devices) in Europe North data center.

·         stgdvcdcoeuwwdxst is a storage account for the staging environment on the dvc project and is specific for the component datacollector service.

 Geographic zones and datacentres

There should always be a default Datacentre to use. Example EMEA North, if there is a need to have failover or has a need to bring data closer to countries, you can split them of in for example three different geographical zones. Every geographical region has a primary datacentre and a corresponding failover datacentre. if you think of having you default datacentre in EMEA I will recommend EMEA West, it seems that new services is available sooner in west than in north. 

• Americas defined as [us-e] or [us-w]

• EMEA defined as [eu-w] or [eu-n]

• Asia-Pacific defined as [ap-s] or [ap-e] 

Geographical zone	Abbreviation	Primary or failover
Americas East	us-e	Primary
Americas West	us-w	Failover
EMEA West	eu-w	Failover
EMEA North	eu-n	Primary
Asia-Pacific Southeast	ap-s	Primary
Asia-Pacific East	ap-e	failover

 Azure services 

Short list of the Azure services can be identified by an abbreviation, here is a short list to get an idea.

Service	abbreviation
TrafficManager	Tm
Website (obsolete)	Ws
Web App	Wa
SQL Database	sdb
SQL Server	sql
Storage	st
Resource Group	rg
App Service Plan (old web hosting plan)	asp
DocumentDB	ddb
DocumentDB Account	dda
Virtual Network	vn
Cloud Service	cs
Azure Service Bus	sb
Virtual Machine	vm
Virtual Images	vmi
Subscriptions	sub
Virtual Images	vmi

Azure environment setup

There are 4 different environment setups in our azure naming conventions. They all have their own abbreviation.

1.     Production This is “live” and is actively being used by customers. This is running on real data and exist on the azure production subscriptions.

2.     Staging this is a validation system that new features are evaluated in before final approval and roll-out to the production system. This is running on data as close to the reality as possible.

3.     Testing this is a system for trying out newly developed features that might not be fully completed. This is running on testing data.

4.     Development this is the playground for developing and explore new things on the Azure platform, and can be removed without further notice.

Environment	abbreviation
Production	prd
Staging	stg
Testing	tst
Development	dev

Hope you think this information was informative, and if you have any suggestions or other ways of doing this, please let me know.

/ronnie