There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. One thing to keep in mind here is that naming should be

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. One thing to keep in mind here is that naming should be done with a lifetime matching the thing being named. If a given machine might have many roles in its lifetime, asset names ought be separate from role names. So calling a machine db2 might not be a good idea unless you have 100% confidence it will only ever be a database machine. So a62848 could be asset 62848, which then can have all kinds of exciting metadata and services pointing to it that may change over the asset's lifetime without needing to update the host name. Baking metadata into a name is usually going to lead to sadness when later attempting to rename. (While I'm the product manager for Google's datacenter software team I'm not speaking for Google here.)