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Staying organized in azure

Staying Organized in Azure

You've seen that using the web portal to create a virtual machine creats a dozen resources. Then you may have other resources (e.g. a storage account) you want to connect to them. How do you keep them all straight?

Naming things

Microsoft suggestion for creating names: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/ready/azure-best-practices/resource-naming

Why do names have an "Environment" element?

IT professionals tend to think of the world in two ways: the stuff I'm doing to try things, and the stuff I've done that now the world can use. That's because once a system is open or connected to a public interface, they have to keep it running. Some use the term "production" or in-production.

  • development (dev): in progress experimental versions, never intended for public use, strictly for our use
  • test: optional state, the system is as close to finished as possible and given to staff to do formal testing to ensure it's ready for publication
  • production (prod): final version released to the public
  • optional "preview" or "beta" : companies use this to get themselves off the hook. It's not really done and they may just remove the service, no guarantees.

A production environment is deploying resources so that they are unchanged, stable and don't have down time. A "site reliability engineer" (SRE) is paid to avoid downtime.

Why do they call out 'region' in this naming scheme? For global web companies, they may deploy duplicate resources in many regions. In addition resources that interaction should be in the same region, e.g. a storage acccount and a VM that uses it should be in the same region to keep the connection fast.

using Azure 'Tags'

Microsoft Components of an Azure resource name. Microsoft suggested naming scheme for Azure resources