The last time this happened, I happened to be in a position of influence for the final decision for naming standards. We took an approach designed to piss off everyone... license plates. We used sequential numbers prepended by a pronounceable string, and random words, selected by a system, for internal services.
Overall, everyone is pretty happy with it. YMMV.
Is there a name for this kind of anti-consensus decision making?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#E...
But I'd tend to call BS - if it wasn't ever an acronym, why capitalize all three letters?
The google ngrams are also suggestive:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=international+...
You see this word in many English roots, such as isotropic, isometric, isomer, etc.
It’s a weird scenario as people are very emotional about their chosen position during the discussion, but literally nobody gives a hoot once a decision was made.
In our case, multiple organizations were merged, so the perception one camp “winning” was important to avoid.
It's like you're dividing an 8-piece pizza between 3 people. Everyone's minimum desire is 2 pieces, compromise solution would be 2 and 2/3 split, and people keep arguing why they deserve more. However you - the decision maker - decide instead to give everyone 2 pieces and throw the remaining 3 pieces into the bin, because shut up and get back to work.
So, throwing away 2 slices, because there is 8 total, is fine, as you stated that is everybody’s agreed minimum desired amount.
And there is no knife, nor protractor.
What is the difference between the worst and best compromise? If it is a compromise, it is a compromise.
Compromise: A solution which pleases the most parties possible while still meeting each party’s needs.
Different experience in English academia, where I encountered random names (e.g. 'mira' for a shell server and 'laplace' for a Physics Dept server). The acronyms could at times be interesting. Particular favourite was a 'central university network time' server. That was later renamed to ntp.*.ac.uk, after stern recommendations.
I hope you never write a single line of code with this mentality...
Pets Service Model
In the pets service model, each pet server is given a loving names like zeus, ares, hades, poseidon, and athena. They are “unique, lovingly hand-raised, and cared for, and when they get sick, you nurse them back to health”. You scale these up by making them bigger, and when they are unavailable, everyone notices.
Examples of pet servers include mainframes, solitary servers, load balancers and firewalls, database systems, and so on. Cattle Service Model
In the cattle service model, the servers are given identification numbers like web-01, web-02, web-03, web-04, and web-05, much the same way cattle are given numbers tagged to their ear. Each server is “almost identical to each other” and “when one gets sick, you replace it with another one”. You scale these by creating more of them, and when one is unavailable, no one notices.
Examples of cattle servers include web server arrays, no-sql clusters, queuing cluster, search cluster, caching reverse proxy cluster, multi-master datastores like Cassandra, big-data cluster solutions, and so on.
[1] https://medium.com/@Joachim8675309/devops-concepts-pets-vs-c...
One set of systems I worked on, a team had names based on islands. Two of the test machines were Trinidad and Tobago. Upon hearing the first syllable, it was clear that these were the test machines. Every additional bit beyond tri or tƏ was distinct and reinforcing that the first bit was heard correctly.
They also had boring names like dc2f1a3r1s4 and foo-test1 (depending on who was interested in the machine).
The problem that I've found with names like asfcap1234 is that one has to listen to every piece of information and remember it to properly identify the machine. With every character being important and distinct, there isn't any reinforcement or mnemonic checksum to make sure you've got it right.
I will note that this is from the era of servers (and even before VMs started being the thing).
It is very true that once humans no longer reference the machines by name, the ability to name them becomes less important.
As a counterpoint to RFC 1178, consider RFC 2100 - The Naming of Hosts https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2100
Of course, the other thing you can do is name server roles rather than specific hardware, so all of your servers are immortal, Ship-of-Theseus style.
Problems with Ginger were being discussed at one stand-up, and an engineer who didn't care about that quietly said, "Blah blah blah Ginger, blah blah blah Ginger." I almost fell over laughing.
(https://desertdemocrat.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gary-lars...)
Now when name them by physical position in the rack/bladecenter.
NB: Yes, I know that the Wikipedia list of "people with many children" makes 50 look like a record-breaking number. That list is Western-centric. Though 50 is a huge number of children even by Arab standards, it is not unheard of.
my beefy desktop may be the whale, the nas is the rhino, the notebooks are roughly dogs, the raspberry pis are small animals like mice, the chromecast is e coli.
plus good: i'm never going to run out of animal names.
Also have used Simpson's for test data. There is some built in structures that can be used Abe-> Homer == Marge > Bart, Maggie, Lisa. Lots of people mostly remember them.
It’s like having a little family.
There are some really small animals, though:
Teaching people to spell yggdrasil correctly in order to get a database connection is fun. For some values of fun.
Now renaming the machine is a multi-day thing involving configuration changes (and that assumes it's not hard coded anywhere) to a whole bunch of software; inevitably you'll miss some and it'll break. Easier not to bother.
Changing the name might imply changing references in other services that make reference to this server for the current services that are still running. It might also imply changing bookmarks in the machines of the users of the services still running on this server.
The bookmarks are a concern because many users don't know how to do anything with bookmarks other than clicking on them, so you can't depend on them understanding how to edit the URLs of these bookmarks. Yes, that's depressing.
However, let me add that if you later decide to change a name (to something sensible like you should have chosen in the first place), you are going to be amazed at the amount of pain awaiting you. No matter how easy the manuals suggest it is to change a name, you will find that lots of obscure software has rapidly accumulated which refers to that computer using that now-ugly name. It all has to be found and changed. People mailing to you from other sites have to be told. And you will have to remember that names on old backup media labels correspond to different names.
Everything else is named based on it's purpose.
www, webapps, data, acccounting, mail, things like that.
But, mail is actually named mailV3 (it's the third hardware the mail server has been on). Why it wasn't just named mail, and if the old one was kept around, it could be mail-old, I don't know.
Then we have our development servers. devel, develv2, www-devel, that kind of stuff. I'd personally prefer devel-whatever the name of the production version is called. Instead we have to thing 'develv2 is actually the development version of dp2950....'
Probably because mail system hostnames end up hardcoded in configuration files all over the place, and it's easier to add one and mirror onto it than to migrate the hardware while keeping the name.
> Nobody expects to learn much about a person by their name.
Names are a reflection of culture, and certain cultures tend towards certain professions. No politically-correct dreams will change that unless we instill a universal monoculture throughout the world. I'm sure that Disney and Coca Cola would love that, but most people would probably prefer to protect their heritage and culture.
They key word there is “tend”. Since it’s not an absolute, it would be unfair and ultimately disadvantageous of anyone to pre-judge individual people based on their name, since it is not a guarantee.
We do forbid it, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-discrimination_ac...
It seems that we have decided as a society that we gain more from the cumulative effect of all people gaining a equal and fair chance, than we would save by allowing people to use whatever branch predictors they like.
It looks like branch predictors in general tend to have unforeseen problems; see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit...
- Dr. Sofia Cerny, the brilliant Czech topologist
- Vlad, a fifth-generation Ukrainian dairy farmer
and
- Jeb, a favorite of the patients at his clinic, who is not on speaking terms with his Southern Baptist pastor father
a) I am, in fact, named after my father.
b) This does, indeed, cause trouble for other people trying to differentiate us.
Ideally, none of our servers are special.
Your code doesn't directly call a service, you'd use a service discovery framework (eg AWS Cloud Map) to lookup a location that can handle a particular type of request. It doesn't even matter to the caller whether the request is handled by an instance (eg EC2), a container (eg Fargate), or a function (eg Lambda).
End user requests are handled by an application loadbalancer (eg ELB) that accepts the requests and routes them to an available location, which again doesn't need to be any particular machine (and it can also spawn/destroy instances as needed) or type.
With serverless computing (eg AWS Lambda), there's not even machine for you to SSH into, the cloud takes care of executing functions "somewhere" to handle your work. Work could mean serving an HTTP request - however there doesn't even need to be a client making a call; the lambda could e.g. run in response to an event on an S3 bucket.
Of course AWS can also handle your pets; ie you can name your EC2 instances (and either manage DNS outside, or use Route 53 to let AWS handle it). But that's not what AWS is about; there are way cheaper options for vServers. And of course there are real computers below this, and DNS is being used in the middle of this (with auto-generated names that you don't care about). But you don't deal with that.
I gotta say that whoever flagged that post has the thinnest skin I've yet encountered. Even for HN, I am slightly surprised.
You realise someone has to do this stuff, right?
“Offended by the use of X to name servers at their workplace” doesn't imply “have never heard and wouldn't recognize the names of X”. Whether X is “porn stars” or “Nazi leaders”.
Naming your servers after porn stars is the digital equivalent of having pin ups in your auto shop. Can you not see how this creates a hostile work environment for some employees? It’s inappropriate, unprofessional and unnecessary.
I shouldn’t even need to footnote this by saying that I don’t care whether someone enjoys porn in their personal life. If the business is not about porn, porn shouldn’t be a topic in the business.
Peace & chill.
People also name servers after Norse gods, which might be offensive to religious folks. Many naming schemes are not innocent unless you just aren't offended about the particular topic. Here's the thing, though -- once we decided that the metric was whether or not someone could be offended by something, then we made everything offensive. Whoops!
This is covered by RFC 1178¹, Choosing a Name for Your Computer (from 1990):
Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine.
A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a number of machines on a shop floor. A while later, a new machine was acquired to help with some of the processing. Needless to say, it couldn't be called "shop" as well. Indeed, both machines ended up performing more specific tasks, allowing more precision in naming. A year later, five new machines were installed and the original one was moved to an unrelated project. It is simply impossible to choose generic names that remain appropriate for very long.
Of course, they could have called the second one "shop2" and so on. But then one is really only distinguishing machines by their number. You might as well just call them "1", "2", and "3". The only time this kind of naming scheme is appropriate is when you have a lot of machines and there are no reasons for any human to distinguish between them. For example, a master computer might be controlling an array of one hundred computers. In this case, it makes sense to refer to them with the array indices.
While computers aren't quite analogous to people, their names are. Nobody expects to learn much about a person by their name. Just because a person is named "Don" doesn't mean he is the ruler of the world (despite what the "Choosing a Name for your Baby" books say). In reality, names are just arbitrary tags. You cannot tell what a person does for a living, what their hobbies are, and so on.
1. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178#page-2