Things I Learnt from a Senior Software Engineer
> <i>Naming your clusters? Naming them after the service that runs on them is great, till the point you start running something else on them too. We ended up naming them with our team name.</i><p>This is covered by RFC 1178¹, <i>Choosing a Name for Your Computer</i> (from 1990):<p><i>Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine.</i><p><i>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.</i><p><i>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.</i><p><i>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.</i><p>1. <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178#page-2" rel="nofollow">https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178#page-2</a>