How to pick an insane FQDN for your cloud server
Yesterday I learned the logic behind the fully qualified domain naming convention of one of the AWS instances.
The FQDN had the form [environment][year][month][day][hour][minute].company.com, which means a test server started at 2014-01-20 08:01 would have the address test201401200801.company.com. It is hard to reach this server should you ever need to know it's address for something important, perhaps a dashboard with health status vital to the operations team. The solution to the last bit is to use a more sensible name and then tie it to the server in DNS with a CNAME.
Although I had bookmarked the URL for the server I wasn't aware there was some logic to the name and definitely not what the format was. So yesterday I heard that the naming convention existed purely because nobody bothered how to manage puppet agents and their certificates properly. The quick solution was to generate a unique name based on the format since at that time it wasn't likely that instances would spin up fast enough to cause a collision.
Strangely my improved naming convention of using the Epoch time or a SHA-1 hash value weren't acceptable alternatives :)