In this post, I’ll try to give an idea about an important aspect in Cloud Adoption Framework methodology, Azure resource naming conventionand why this is something essential as it helps you keep your resources organized, it also help to easy identify and protects you from making things complicated when it comes time to manage them.
Why use a naming convention practice?
A proper naming convention is essential for a number of reasons:
- Easy to find a resource when a user (Admin) filters Azure Portal resources
- You can easily adhere to a unique names policy for resources
- It is useful for calculating the cost of resources.
According to MS documentation there are naming rules for Azure resources vary based on their type. You should also bear in mind that the Azure resource names have length limits. For more details, click Naming rules and restrictions for Azure resources.
Determine a naming convention
Let us see an example of naming an Azure resource. The general naming convention proposal would be something like the one below:
Βetween the components that form the name you can for example use hyphen (-) or underscore (_), i.e. vm-webapp-dev-westeurope-01
The matrix below depicts a few more examples with several types of Azure resources:
| Resource type | Workload / App | Environment | Azure Region | Instance |
| rg – {resource group} | webapp | dev | westeurope | 01 |
| asp – {app service plan} | webapp | dev | westeurope | 01 |
| ai – {application insights} | webapp | dev | westeurope | 01 |
The image below depicts how your Azure resources name will show after applying the above rules:
To get more abbreviation examples about Azure resources, see below:
- AI + machine learning
- Analytics and IoT
- Compute and web
- Containers
- Databases
- Developer tools
- DevOps
- Integration
- Management and governance
- Migration
- Networking
- Security
- Storage
- Virtual desktop infrastructure
Another significant aspect that has to do with Azure resource management is the tagging strategy.
The benefit that the tagging strategy can have is for filtering and reporting on resources when it comes to resource usage and billing.
The image below depicts how your tags will show on your resource group:
To read more about how you can define your tagging strategy, see Define your tagging strategy.
Whenever someone creates resources, resource groups or subscriptions, you can force them to add a new tag by adding a policy definition, as shown in the image below:
To summarize, understanding and using a clear and consistent Azure resource naming standard is essential for successful cloud adoption and administration within the Azure ecosystem. Organizations may expedite resource organization, make it simpler to identify resources, and reduce the risk of complexity in resource management by using established naming standards. Finally, a well-designed naming convention is a key component in encouraging efficiency, clarity, and scalability in cloud systems, resulting in smoother operations and increased overall productivity.