Naming Conventions
Overview
Scaled Sense gathers information and metadata in various contexts when defining resources in the Scaled Sense Portal. One of the key outcomes of this metadata collection is to establish readable and consistent naming conventions when provisioning resources to the configured providers in the organization.
A good naming convention helps users of an organization quickly identify key information about cloud resources and enables predictable patterns for authorizing automated processes to optimize a business. Having a defined naming convention is also a critical step of the Cloud Adoption Framework[1].
Maintaining consistency with naming conventions can be challenging with varying requirements for different providers and cloud resource naming constraints. Scaled Sense solves this problem by prescribing a concise set of naming conventions for use in workloads provisioned by the platform.
Components of Naming Conventions
Business Keys
When creating nearly anything in Scaled Sense, a user will be prompted to specify a business key. Business keys can be thought of as identifiers that meet a set of constraints for uniqueness, length, and characters for the particular platform resource.
Business keys are a key component in uniquely identifying the cloud resources provisioned by Scaled Sense to tie them back to their definition within the platform.
Examples
- Organization business key is required to be 2-3 lowercase letters and must be unique across all organizations using the Scaled Sense platform
- Product Role business key is required to be 1-16 characters and must be unique within the Scaled Sense Organization
- Environment Type business key is required to be 1-16 characters and must be unique within the Scaled Sense Organization
- Criticality Tier business key is required to be 2-16 characters and must be unique within the Scaled Sense Organization
- Service business key is required to be 2-4 lowercase letters or numbers and must be unique within its Product within the Scaled Sense platform
Short Names
Similar to business keys, many platform resources in Scaled Sense require specifying a short name. Short names are intended to be more verbose than business keys, but still constrained to sets of rules to allow for use in naming conventions used by the platform. However, if your business key is clear, you are permitted to use the same value for the short name.
Examples
- Business Unit short name is required to be 2-16 characters and must be unique within the Scaled Sense Organization
- Product short name is required to be 2-30 characters and must be unique within the Scaled Sense Organization
- Service short name is required to be 2-30 characters and must be unique within its Product in the Scaled Sense Organization
Use Cases
To provide additional uniqueness for cloud resource names and to provide an opportunity to distinguish a cloud resource's purpose from others, the majority of naming conventions used include a use case segment. The use case values are predefined and controlled by Scaled Sense and are set based on the intended usage for each cloud resource provisioned as part of a Service.
Many use cases are presented as friendly names, such as app or inf or data, however in situations where a friendly name is not required or not appropriate, Scaled Sense includes a generated four letter value to complete the segment of the naming convention.
Naming Conventions Used
Internal Service
Some cloud resources created for Services are shared across all environments deployed for the Service.
Convention
{resource type}-{business unit}-{product short name}-{service short name}-{use case}
Examples
- Entra ID Group -
sg-it-sharedservices-hostingplatform-operations
Internal Service - No Resource Type
Some cloud resources created for Services are shared across all environments deployed for the Service and are better represented without including the resource type in the name.
Convention
{business unit}-{product short name}-{service short name}-{use case}
Examples
- GitHub Repository -
it-sharedservices-hostingplatform-inf
Internal Service - Region-agnostic Environment Resource
The majority of cloud resources provisioned by Scaled Sense will be tied to a particular instance of an environment. Some of those resources will not be associated with a location and this naming convention represents the naming of those resources.
Convention
{resource type}-{business unit}-{product short name}-{service short name}-{use case}-{environment}
Examples
- Entra ID App Registration -
appreg-it-sharedservices-hostingplatform-inf-dev1
Internal Service - Region-specific Environment Resource
Cloud resources provisioned by Scaled Sense associated with an environment and region will be named according to this naming convention.
Convention
{resource type}-{product short name}-{service short name}-{use case}-{environment}-{region}
Examples
- Resource Group -
rg-sharedservices-hostingplatform-aks-p1-ue2
Internal Product - Shared Resource
A small number of cloud resources provisioned by Scaled Sense are not associated with a particular Service.
Convention
{business unit}-{product short name}-{use case}-{environment}
Examples
- Azure Subscription -
it-sharedservices-1-np1
Globally Unique - No hyphens and 24 characters or less
Some cloud resources constrain naming to 24 characters or less and prevent the usage of hyphens. In addition, these names are required to be globally unique across all users for that provider.
Convention
{company}{product business key}{service business key}{use case}{environment}{region}
Examples
- Azure Storage Account -
cosshpaksp1ue2 - Azure Key Vault -
cosskvaksp1ue2
Globally Unique - 40 characters or less
This naming convention is the most commonly used by Scaled Sense as it fits the majority of scenarios and provides the best readability.
Convention
{resource type}-{company}-{product business key}-{service business key}-{use case}-{environment}-{region}
Examples
- Azure Kubernetes Service -
aks-co-it-k8s-aks-p1-ue2 - Azure Event Hub Namespace -
evhns-co-it-evh-hlej-stg1-ue2