Everything needs a name, including Azure subscriptions, resource groups and resources. I think we all can agree that naming conventions are important but boring to design and maintain. For some organizations it’s life or death to make sure that everything is named according to company policy and other organizations don’t even have a standard when it’s time to deploy. Trust me, I’ve seen all variants out there.
When I meet customers to help them get started with Azure I ask them about their existing naming convention and if we can add the new Azure stuff to that. Most customers are not prepared for those questions and there isn’t anything in place that we can use.
When this happens it’s important to pause the work and take some time to agree on how we are going to name stuff in Azure. Names in Azure are not easily changed, even resource groups can’t be renamed, so it’s important to get it right from the start. If this is done correctly from the beginning it will be much easier to know what belongs to what and to whom it belongs. In the cloud you are supposed to pay for what you use and it’s just plain stupid to pay for resources that’s just sitting there because nobody knows who created them or who owns them. Do this right from the start!
For this particular reason I’ve created an Azure Naming Convention, free to use by anyone interested. You can use it as is or you can use it as a starting point when you craft your own convention.
Naming subscriptions and resources in Azure can be a bit complex sometimes. There are many different naming rules and restrictions depending on the resource type and because of that I’ve included that information in the naming convention as well. You’ll also find recommended patterns and examples.
You can download my Azure Naming Convention in Excel and PDF format here:
Excel: Azure Naming Convention version 1
PDF: Azure Naming Convention version 1
The naming convention is based on the official Microsoft documentation with a couple of minor tweaks based on my own experience working with the platform.
I hope this resource can help you, your customers or both.
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Daniel Chronlund Cloud Security Blog 