Azure – Naming conventions to resources – Best Practices

Hi All,

Greetings for the day!!!

Background

• After Azure administration training, started my AZURE journey. Started with preparation of Azure exam – AZ-104
• Started with exploring important concepts like AZURE Virtual Network and creating my first AZURE Virtual Network . We have very good article on Virtual Network for starters – Preparing AZ-104 : Understand Virtual Networks (VNet) – Important concept / feature in AZURE – Simplifying concepts
• First step in creating AZURE Virtual Network is creating Resource Group. We have detailed article on Azure Resource group, kindly please have a look – Azure – Resource and Resource group
• So as I started created resource group, thought came for naming conventions – is there any best practice – so the research and sharing
• If you dont have AZURE environment to start or to do POC – try with free account. We have detailed article – Azure : creating Azure free account

Take away from this article

• Understand why naming conventions / best practices are important for AZURE resources
• What naming conventions should follow for AZURE resources – What Microsoft suggest
• AZURE resource scopes
• AZURE resource naming components
• Know about Azure naming tool and Microsoft Azure naming template

Why AZURE resource naming conventions are important

• Properly used naming conventions helps to quickly locate and manage resources
• A properly structured naming system enables us to quickly identify resources for both management and accounting purposes
• Accurately defined naming conventions helps for security purpose as well
• Security services such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel reference resources and their associated logging and alert information by resource name
• A good name helps us to quickly identify the resource’s type, associated workload, environment, and the Azure region hosting it
• AZURE resource names must be unique in there scope. There are different level scopes like
  • Global – This means resource name must be unique across AZURE irrespective of Azure subscription or region
  • Subscription – Unique within subscription
  • Resource Group – Resource name must be unique within given Resource Group
  • Resource Attribute – Within specific Azure resource – for example subnet name in given Virtual Network

Naming conventions for AZURE resources

• Resource and resource group names are case-insensitive
• An effective naming convention consists of resource names from important information about each resource

• As in above image – name for – public IP resource for a production SharePoint workload in the West US region – pip-sharepoint-prod-westus-001
• While naming our resource we need to identify the key information which we want to reflect in resource name
• Most important point is – standard naming convention for our resources in our environment in our organization
• Microsoft suggests abbreviations for Azure resources, please have a look once – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/ready/azure-best-practices/resource-abbreviations
• Naming components

Naming component	Description
Organization	Top-level name of organization, normally utilized as top management group or, in smaller organizations, part of the naming convention. Example: contoso
Business unit or department	Top-level division of your company that owns the subscription or workload the resource belongs to. In smaller organizations, this component might represent a single corporate top-level organizational element. Examples: fin, mktg, product, it, corp
Resource type	An abbreviation that represents the type of Azure resource or asset. This component often is used as a prefix or suffix in the name. For more information, see Recommended abbreviations for Azure resource types. Examples: rg, vm
Project, application, or service name	Name of a project, application, or service that the resource is a part of. Examples: navigator, emissions, sharepoint, hadoop
Environment	The stage of the development lifecycle for the workload that the resource supports. Examples: prod, dev, qa, stage, test
Location	The region or cloud provider where the resource is deployed. Examples: westus, eastus2, westeu, usva, ustx
VM role	Identifier for the purpose of the VM. Examples: db (database), ws (web server), ps (print server)
Instance	The instance count for a specific resource to identify more than one resource that has the same naming convention. Examples, 01, 001

• Length Limit for AZURE resource name
  • AZURE have its own naming rules and restrictions for resources those must be considered while naming our resource, please have a look – Naming rules and restrictions for Azure resources
  • Resource names have length limits. Microsoft recommend that we should keep the length of naming components short to prevent exceeding resource name length limits
  • Length limit for respective resources are specified in above article – Naming rules and restrictions for Azure resources
• Microsoft also provides vary good template naming AZURE resource – must download and have a look once – Naming and tagging tracking template
• Please have a look at article – Define your naming convention – very detailed article

AZURE naming tool

• Free tool which helps us to define and manage naming conventions for our Azure resources in our organization
• We can download AZURE naming tool from – https://github.com/microsoft/CloudAdoptionFramework/tree/master/ready/AzNamingTool
• I’ll write separate article for installation and using AZURE naming tool

Best practices / Precautions to be taken care

• Once created resource – changing resource name is bit difficult. So we must establish proper / comprehensive naming convention before any major cloud deployment
• Always perform a case-insensitive comparison of names – while using APIs to retrieve the name for resource or resource group

REFERENCES

• Azure – Resource and Resource group
• Preparing AZ-104 : Understand Virtual Networks (VNet) – Important concept / feature in AZURE – Simplifying concepts
• Azure naming tool – https://github.com/microsoft/CloudAdoptionFramework/tree/master/ready/AzNamingTool
• Azure : simplifying concepts – discussing Azure Subscription in detail- helps in preparing Azure certifications and interviews
• Naming rules and restrictions for Azure resources

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HAVE A FANTASTIC TIME AHEAD !!! ENJOY BEAUTIFUL LIFE 🙂