I've gone through a variety of hostnaming strategies over the years, and the one I use now is <service><##> (eg zookeeper01).<p>With distributed systems in particular, but any system in general, boxes can come and go, and I hate having holes in my names (eg zookeeper01, 02, 04, 05, 06). That, and by choosing the number of leading zeroes, you're guessing at the max number of servers this service will be served by.<p>How do people manage this? I'm thinking something like <service>-<random_token> (eg zookeeper-fi2) would make sense and be more scalable, but I'm interested in what strategies other people use.<p>(I'd create a poll but I don't have the 200 karma) =/
I like to think of everything as ephemeral. You can always write software for a new box to "fill in" holes when systems are replaced. I like this because it helps me when I assign roles or node based redundancy to my boxes.