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Nobody wants to spell empedokles at 4am. And if you're not the person who has to deal with this problem, then you are a dick to whoever does, if you name a serv

Nobody wants to spell empedokles at 4am. And if you're not the person who has to deal with this problem, then you are a dick to whoever does, if you name a server something like this. "server three" actually does give you information. It's a server. Not a router. Not a firewall. Not a load balancer. Not a desktop. Not a laptop. Not your HSM. Not the telco gear. Etc... etc... If "well I don't have any of those things", then sure, whatever. If you have three servers, then it doesn't matter. But then you grow a bit. And now you have 20 servers, and kinda matters that you have a pattern that IS NOT "greek vs roman gods", but maybe "diskfulls" and "CPU-monsters". At a previous company we named these "db<n>" and "quick<n>". And did not reuse numbers, because then we could also infer the hardware generation (lower number means older hardware). db<n> wasn't even running any relational database. We could have named them "storage<n>", and it wouldn't have made a difference to the fact that the name was incredibly useful. Sometimes you can save the company your entire year's salary by reducing an outage by the few minutes not making typos or misunderstanding about "is this part of prod or not?". Communication is important, and coming up with the "funniest" name is not so funny when the site is down and you're trying to figure out the problem.

ehnto 5y ago
Fair enough, I think it's clear that "it depends" then because those were not issues for us and our set up. We weren't running a server farm, these were just internal development servers, the parts that did have context were named appropriately like "Production, Staging, Feature-1" etc. The networking was trivial. I am sure you are right and that if it had grown, a naming convention would be nice. I do get a bit tired of the Everything is Enterprise approach to software. We aren't all trying to scale to the moon, and enterprise tooling has it's own costs.

ehnto 5y ago

Fair enough, I think it's clear that "it depends" then because those were not issues for us and our set up. We weren't running a server farm, these were just internal development servers, the parts that did have context were named appropriately like "Production, Staging, Feature-1" etc. The networking was trivial. I am sure you are right and that if it had grown, a naming convention would be nice. I do get a bit tired of the Everything is Enterprise approach to software. We aren't all trying to scale to the moon, and enterprise tooling has it's own costs.