Ask HN: DNS naming conventions for cloud environments
- What sort of naming conventions do you use for your cloud environments?
- How do names correlate to environment (dev, staging, prod, etc), region (us-west-2, etc) and so on?
- How do you scope non-prod environment sub domains to reduce collision with business/product subdomains (e.g. marketing might want to use stage.example.com)?
For example:
- staging.example.com points to a load balancer for staging workloads
- the request is routed to us-west-2.staging.example.com via a geolocation routing policy (closest region to the user)
- us-west-2.staging.example.com load balancer proxies the request to the backend workload(s)
Comments
In the organisations I have worked, we have normally done something like this:
- <environment>-<component>-<application>.<application-portfolio/team>-<tenancy>.<hosting-environment>.<business_name>.com
This allowed us to delegate hosted zones to the application teams to self-manage their dns.
Example, the hosted zone:
- marketing-nonprod.aws.example.com
Would appear as a hosted zone in the Marketing, Non-Production aws account. Note that we track the "Tenancy Environment", i.e. whether it's a prod/non-prod/labs. This will map to multiple application environments, e.g. UAT/INT/etc will be under non-prod.
Then an application like:
- prod-web-app.marketing-prod.aws.example.com
could have a cname to:
- app.example.com
Which we would handle as a one-off service request to the central DNS management team (often dealing with things like Akemai at that stage).
If the application stack required multi-regionality, we could added a regional identifier into the application name.
My approach is overkill in many orgs. Many of these issues are made simpler through mechanisms like service discovery.