Are there any naming conventions for services and their associated domain?

Question

I'm wondering if there are any widely used and proved naming conventions for DNS entries, for example let's say I've a company domain, like foobar.net and I've a bunch of services like a db for an application of our french branch, I'd though of db.myapp.fr.foobar.net.

I don't mind being verbose as I'm really not confident with abstract names like strasky.foobar.net and hutch.foobar.net to define my hostname.

Thanks

Strasky and Hutch? I wonder what kind of Russian POS car those guys drove. — TheCleaner, Sep 03 '13 at 19:16
This got addressed at some length in http://serverfault.com/questions/479945/choosing-between-meaningful-and-meaningless-hostnames/479947#479947 . — MadHatter, Sep 04 '13 at 05:59

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 03 '13 at 18:13

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Much like naming your children or your pets, naming conventions are completely subjective. While there may be some tendency toward standardization within an organization, it's completely up to the organization or individual.

answered Sep 03 '13 at 18:13

joeqwerty

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 03 '13 at 17:39

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Nope, it's totally a free-for-all. Whatever works for your company is what works for your company.

answered Sep 03 '13 at 17:39

mrdenny

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I bet, but there may be some proven solution or feedbacks from experienced people :) – Boris Guéry Sep 03 '13 at 17:42
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These days so little is directly accessible from the public internet that most of my clients are hosting everything from www using content redirection within their load balancers to route stuff to different servers so that everything is masked to the user. – mrdenny Sep 03 '13 at 17:53
I agree, but for example, I'm currently working with AWS, and their dns entries are not really straight-forward, let's say I've a managed Elastic Load Balancer, the dns is like 200 random chars, so even if it is not publicly accessible it may be through a bastion server, and using consistent naming seems a good practice to me, and when managing hundred of services I'd like to have fairly intention revealing name which helps remember them. – Boris Guéry Sep 03 '13 at 17:59
There is no "proven solution" from "experienced people". Literally every client I have ever worked for has found some radically different and unique schema for this. Just make something up that will fit your business correctly. – Falcon Momot Sep 03 '13 at 18:11

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 03 '13 at 23:56

One piece of advice - which does not directly answer your question, admittedly -

DON'T USE HOSTNAMES FOR SERVICES. Because hostnames will change, eventually. Ideally, from the start, they will be abstracted behind some sort of scalability mechanism (DFS, load-balancing VIPs, HA cluster VIPs, etc). Don't depend on fred.example.org being the SMTP relay. Have a CNAME, smtp-outbound.example.org that points to fred, so that when you add wilma as a second (or replacement) relay server, you don't have to change the config files on all of your hosts that send mail.

Are there any naming conventions for services and their associated domain?

3 Answers3