Best Practices

• An effective naming convention composes resource name from important information about each resource
• A well-chosen name helps to quickly identify the resource’s type and associated workload, deployment environment, etc.
• Resource name should be unique within the subscription
• Resource name should be precise and easy to understand
• Following same naming convention for entire organization
• Long words in the resource name should be abbreviated and small words would be used as it is
• Using names that are easy to read i.e., using word separating characters if possible/allowed
• Avoiding verbosity & very long names

Restrictions

There are certain restrictions that must be followed while creating Azure resources:

• Resource name can’t include % and can’t end with period “.” or space “ ”
• For VM machine, resource name can have up to 64 characters
• Network resources naming convention can have character length between 1-80 character which should consist of Alphanumeric, underscores, periods, and hyphens. It should start with alphanumeric. End alphanumeric or underscore
• Storage account name can have character length between 3-24 consist of lowercase letters and numbers
• Database Server name can have character length between 3-63 Lowercase letters, hyphens and numbers. Can’t start or end with hyphen
• While coming to Azure web services, certificates can have name length between 1-260. Can’t end with space or period and can’t use “\” as well
• In general, resources have name length (characters count) limit that varies for different resources
• Some resources must be uniquely named across entire Azure, for example domain name (i.e., “foo.com”)
• More details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/resource-name-rules

Abbreviation for Resource Types

Format

Use all lowercase letters to make it consistent because certain resources only allow lowercase letters.

Examples

rg-main-hsystem-dev-japaneast

rg-microservice-hsystem-dev-japaneast
rg-microservice-hsystem-dev-japaneast-001

rg-microservice-hsystem-qa-japaneast
rg-microservice-hsystem-dr-japanwest

rg-webapp-hsystem-prod-japaneast
rg-webapp-hsystem-prod-japaneast-001

Explanation

1. ResourceTypeAbbreviation:
   • Short form of resource types
   • https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/ready/azure-best-practices/resource-abbreviations
2. Workload/Purpose
   • What kind of workload will be hosted
   • Purpose of the infrastructure
3. SystemName:
   • Name of the system
   • What is the name of the whole solution that infrastructure is being created for
4. EnvironmentName:
   • Target environment
   • Dev, QA, Prod, Dr etc.
5. Region:
   • In which region the resource will be created
   • Japan East, Japan West etc.
6. Optional suffix
   • Suffix is optional
   • Use suffix only if identical resources will be created in same region
   • Example for usage of suffix: when you need multiple Azure SQL Managed Instance for same environment in the same region

Exceptions

• Management Group:
  • Management group does not have to follow same convention as normal resource
  • mg-<system-name>
  • Example: mg-hsystem (root), mg-hsystem-dev-qa (under root management group and contains 2 subscriptions - Dev & QA)
• Subscription:
  • Subscription does not have to follow same convention as normal resource
  • subscription-<system-name>-<environment>-<region>
  • Example: subscription-hsystem-dev-japaneast, subscription-hsystem-dr-japanwest
• Storage Account:
  • samainhsystemdev (no need for region for GZRS or RA-GZRS)
  • Lowercase letters and numbers, maximum 24 characters
• Azure Container Registry:
  • acrmainhsystemdev (no need for region when secondary replica is used)
  • Alphanumerics, maximum 50 characters
• More details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/resource-name-rules

Subnet Naming

• Use Pascal Case
• Example:
  • AksAppClusterSubnet
  • AksKafkaClusterSubnet
  • SqlMiSubnet
  • ApplicationGatewaySubnet

Mandatory subnet names

• Vitual Network Gateway (Express route or VPN) subnet name must be GatewaySubnet
• Azure Firewall Subnet must be AzureFirewallSubnet