ninans

NINANS - Ninans Is Not A Naming Standard

• source code on GitHub

Introduction

There are a number of public cloud providers who offer services in different geographic regions. Regions are always named differently across providers. Some people like to deploy things in multiple clouds. Some people like to encode information in the names of the resources they deploy in clouds. This may or may not be a good idea.

It may be useful to name stuff consistently, regardless of which cloud provider or region you use. That’s NINANS.

Principles

• Concise. Some systems require short hostnames (e.g. NetBIOS = 15 characters). Leave spare characters for local naming components.
• Compatible. Lower case letters and numbers only and start with a letter.
• Machine readable. Fixed length overall. Each name component is also fixed length.
• Predictable. Use existing standards (locations based on ISO standards).

The not a standard

${provider[2]}${service_qualifier[1]}${country[2]}${subdivision_or_compass_direction[3]}${numerical_qualifier[2]}

(total 10 characters)

Name components

1. Provider

Code	Provider
aw	Amazon Web Services
az	Microsoft Azure
do	DigitalOcean
gc	Google Cloud Platform

2. Service qualifier

Code	Service qualifier
b	AWS iso-b secret partition
e	Azure Early Updates Access Program
g	AWS GovCloud
i	AWS iso secret partition
j	Azure Jio partner region
s	Standard region (no special qualifier)

3. Country

Use the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 lowercased two character country code for the region.

4. Subdivision or compass direction

Subdivision (first preference)

• When the subdivision within a country of the provider region is known and documented, use the most specific but accurate available ISO 3166-2 lowercased three character subdivision code for the location.
• Where multiple official codes for a single subdivision exist in different administrative languages, use the English code (e.g. Cardiff = CRF).
• Where subdivision codes are less than three characters in length, pad with x characters as a suffix to make three characters (e.g. California = cax, Seoul = 11x).

Compass direction (second preference)

• A compass direction may be used instead of a country subdivison only when the country subdivision is unknown, but the compass direction is known. Use the accepted abbrevations for the cardinal and ordinal compass directions.
• Pad compass direction with x characters as a prefix to make three characters (e.g. north = xxn, southwest = xsw).

No subdivision or compass direction (third preference)

If no information about the subdivision or campass direction of a region is available, use three x characters.

5. Numerical qualifier

• The provider’s own numerical qualifier for a region padded with a leading 0 if required (e.g. AWS us-east-1 = 01).
• Where no numerical qualifier exists, use 00 (e.g. Azure westeurope = 00).

Special notes

1. London: The ISO 3166-2:GB standard, listing codes for subdivisions of the United Kingdom, has codes for the individual London boroughs and for the City of London. It does not have a code for the Greater London area. Where a provider’s region is listed simply as “London”, use the code for the City of London (LND) for the NINANS subdivision component.

Examples

Provider	Provider region name	Provider service qualifier	Country	Subdivision or compass direction	NINANS
Microsoft Azure	centralus	None	United States	Iowa	azsusiax00
Microsoft Azure	jioindiawest	Azure Jio partner region	India	Gujarāt	azjingjx00
Microsoft Azure	eastus2euap	Early Updates Access Program	United States	Virginia	azeusvax02
Microsoft Azure	koreacentral	None	Republic of Korea	Seoul	azskr11x00
Amazon Web Services	eu-west-2	None	United Kingdom	London	awsgblnd02
Amazon Web Services	us-gov-west-1	AWS GovCloud	United States	West United States	awgusxxw01
DigitalOcean	fra1	None	Germany	Hesse	dosdehex01
Google Cloud Platform	asia-northeast1	None	Japan	Tokyo	gcsjp13x01