Recommended naming and tagging conventions

• 03/05/2020
• 10 minutes to read
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Organize your cloud assets to support operational management and accounting requirements. Well-defined naming and metadata tagging conventions help to quickly locate and manage resources. These conventions also help associate cloud usage costs with business teams via chargeback and showback accounting mechanisms.

Azure defines naming rules and restrictions for Azure resources. This guidance provides detailed recommendations to support enterprise cloud adoption efforts.

Changing resource names can be difficult. Establish a comprehensive naming convention before you begin any large cloud deployment.

Naming and tagging resources

A naming and tagging strategy includes business and operational details as components of resource names and metadata tags:

The business side of this strategy ensures that resource names and tags include the organizational information needed to identify the teams. Use a resource along with the business owners who are responsible for resource costs.

The operational side ensures that names and tags include information that IT teams use to identify the workload, application, environment, criticality, and other information useful for managing resources.

Resource naming

An effective naming convention assembles resource names by using important resource information as parts of a resource's name. For example, using these recommended naming conventions, a public IP resource for a production SharePoint workload is named like this: pip-sharepoint-prod-westus-001.

From the name, you can quickly identify the resource's type, its associated workload, its deployment environment, and the Azure region hosting it.

Naming scope

All Azure resource types have a scope that defines the level that resource names must be unique. A resource must have a unique name within its scope.

For example, a virtual network has a resource group scope, which means that there can be only one network named vnet-prod-westus-001 in a given resource group. Other resource groups could have their own virtual network named vnet-prod-westus-001. Subnets are scoped to virtual networks, so each subnet within a virtual network must be uniquely named.

Some resource names, such as PaaS services with public endpoints or virtual machine DNS labels, have global scopes, which means that they must be unique across the entire Azure platform.

Resource names have length limits. Balancing the context embedded in a name with its scope and length is important when you develop your naming conventions. For more information, see naming rules and restrictions for Azure resources.

Recommended naming components

When you construct your naming convention, identify the key pieces of information that you want to reflect in a resource name. Different information is relevant for different resource types. The following list provides examples of information that are useful when you construct resource names.

Keep the length of naming components short to prevent exceeding resource name length limits.

Recommended resource-type prefixes

Each workload can consist of many individual resources and services. Incorporating resource type prefixes into your resource names makes it easier to visually identify application or service components.

This list recommends Azure resource type prefixes to use when you define your naming conventions.

General

Networking

Compute and Web

Databases

Storage

AI and Machine Learning

Analytics and IoT

Integration

Management and governance

Migration

Metadata tags

When you apply metadata tags to your cloud resources, you can include information about those assets that couldn't be included in the resource name. You can use that information to perform more sophisticated filtering and reporting on resources. You want these tags to include context about the resource's associated workload or application, operational requirements, and ownership information. This information can be used by IT or business teams to find resources or generate reports about resource usage and billing.

What tags you apply to resources and what tags are required or optional differs among organizations. The following list provides examples of common tags that capture important context and information about a resource. Use this list as a starting point to establish your own tagging conventions.

Example names

The following section provides some example names for common Azure resource types in an enterprise cloud deployment.

Example names: General

Example names: Networking

Example names: Compute and Web

Example names: Databases

Example names: Storage

Example names: AI and machine learning

Example names: Analytics and IoT

Example names: Integration