Using Windows CNAMEs to Reduce Server Confusion
April 3, 2012
A common challenge for development teams is remembering the names for all of the different servers in an enterprise environment when the server naming convention is either not descriptive ("Deathstar", "Falcon", "XWing") or obscure ("abcDBS001", "abcDBS002", "abcWEB01"). The Star Wars names suffer from an obvious problem of mapping description to purpose. Those obscure names are commonly used to help distinguish between dozens to hundreds of different servers in an enterprise. Arguably they are helpful to the infrastructure team as they manage this motley collection. But for a developer, remembering if "abcWEB01" is the test web server or prod can be challenging; even when remembered, it would be simple enough to overlook or accidentally type "abcWEB04".
A Windows Server can be configured with a name alias (CNAME) that preserves the naming convention used by infrastructure, but helps the development team avoid confusion and accidents. Assuming that there is a good separation between servers – say, development, test, and production – and their purposes – say, web apps, services, reports, and database – wouldn't it just be easier to refer to:
- devweb
- testweb
- prodweb
- devservices
- testsql
- et cetera
Of course, that scheme presumes that there is only one server in each category. If there are multiple servers in order to fit different needs, then find a name that explains that need: for example, testexternalweb and testinernalweb, for DMZ and internal web servers. I can't begin to reckon the number of times such an (aliased) naming convention would have helped avoid mistakes and improved communication over the years.
Bonus: if abcWEB01 needs to be retired and replaced by with abcWeb10, just change the CNAME so that prodweb points to the new server. Application configuration nightmare averted.
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