The different Resource Names in Azure

In my previous blog article, I touched already slightly on this topic, the need to have a naming convention for the different Azure Resources. Probably not the fanciest topic to write about, and often underestimated its importance. Maybe there is reason why it’s worth spending some time on it? Defining some naming patterns before you deploy resources in Azure (or any cloud) is vital because…

  • … it can be difficult (or not possible without delete and re-create) to change a name later;
  • … management and troubleshooting can become easier;
  • … names must meet the requirements of the specific resource type.

Unfortunately, most of the concepts used today are optimized for an on-premises world only and aren’t easily extensible nor adaptable to the public cloud. Luckily Microsoft has released a great article on naming convention which provides excellent insights and works perfectly fine as a starting point.

If you can’t say something nice, say it in French.

― Anonymous

Most Common Resources to name

Each resource or service type in Azure enforces a set of naming restrictions and scope. Any naming convention or pattern must adhere to the requisite naming rules and scope.

An extended copy of this table has been added below – you probably notice immediately the different rules applied to the resources or entity:

Resource or Entity Length Casing Valid Characters
Subscription Case insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, parentheses and underscores
Resource Group 1-64 Case insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, parentheses, periods and underscores
Availability Set 1-80 Case insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens and underscores
Virtual Machine 1-15 (Windows) 1-64 (Linux) Case insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens and underscores
Storage Account name 3-24Lower case Alphanumeric
Container name 3-63 Lower case Alphanumeric and hyphens
Blob name 1-1024 Case sensitive Alphanumeric and hyphens
Queue name 3-63 Lower case Alphanumeric and hyphens
Recovery Services Vault 2-50 Case-insensitive Alphanumeric and hyphens
Virtual Network (VNet) 2-64Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
Subnet 1-80Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
Network Interface 1-80Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
Network Security Group 1-80Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
Network Security Rules 1-80Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
Public IP Address 1-80Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
Load Balancer 1-80Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
VNet Peering 1-80Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
Azure Application Gateway 1-80Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
Traffic Manager Profile 1-63Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens and periods
Network Virtual Appliance 1-63Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores
ExpressRoute Circuit 1-80Case-insensitive Alphanumeric, hyphens, periods and underscores

The usage of Special Characters

Besides length and “cASinG”, the use of special characters can be very confusing. A good rule of thumb, avoid having any special characters as the first or last character in any name. These characters will cause most validation rules to fail.

Also, understand which !exact! characters are and are not available for which resource:

Characters Value
Alphanumeric, letters and numbers abc…xyz 123…890
Hyphen
Period .
Underscore _
Parentheses ( )

Some documentation mention “dash” instead of “hyphen”. Probably just a confusion of names for those special characters, but still something to pay attention on:

  • Dash: – is not used, see hyphen
  • Brackets: [ ] , { } are not used, see parentheses

There’s just one more thing…

While a name of a virtual machine object could be up to 64 characters, there is a limitation of 15 characters for virtual machines using Windows. Some background on this – a virtual machine resource has two distinct names: a name for the virtual machine, the Azure resource, and a name for the computer, the name used in the operating system. When you deploy machine from the Azure Portal, the same name will be used for both objects.

So where is the limitation of 15 characters limits coming from? This restriction is entirely due to NetBIOS. Yes, I said NetBIOS – that old NetBIOS. As some components still rely on those components, we are bound to the limitation of the computer name, 15 characters.

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1 thought on “The different Resource Names in Azure”

  1. After reading this great article of yours and taking into account the other side of the coin explained in , my team and I ended up exactly with this nice dilemma of wandering if a naming convention is really needed. We are stuck in hey! There’s no abbrev for hostpool, let’s use hp. Or, hey! Do we really need to include a region affix? So different approches like the one at or the one slightly different at seems to support the idea that tagging is more relevant than naming.

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