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Management and governance aa

Automation account naming convention

The CAF abbreviation for Automation account is aa. Names can be 6 to 50 characters long and allow alphanumerics and hyphens. The name must be unique within the resource group.

Naming rules

CAF abbreviation aa
Length 6 to 50 characters
Allowed characters Alphanumerics (a-z, A-Z, 0-9), hyphens
Scope of uniqueness Unique within the resource group
CAF pattern aa-{workload}-{environment}-{region}-{instance}

Rules follow Microsoft's resource naming rules and CAF abbreviations. Some resource types have extra start/end character restrictions, so verify against the official docs before locking in a convention.

Naming Management and governance resources

Subscriptions and management groups sit at the top of this category and have their own guide covering immutable IDs versus display names. Resource groups are the single most created resource in Azure and the one place teams disagree most, workload first or type first, prefix or suffix, consistency matters far more than which specific order you settle on, which is also why this site lets you reorder the pattern rather than force one.

Log Analytics workspaces and Application Insights are usually centralized per environment rather than created per app, so name them for the environment or platform boundary they observe. The common mistake is spinning up a separate Log Analytics workspace per app, which prevents the cross service log correlation that a shared workspace exists to provide in the first place.

Example names

Generated by the same engine as the name generator, so length and character rules are already applied.

Scenario Generated name Length
Payments API, production aa-payments-prod-eus-001 24/50
Web app, development aa-webapp-dev-weu-002 21/50
Analytics with company prefix aa-contoso-analytics-stage-uks-001 34/50

Naming in Terraform and Bicep

Build the name from variables so one module produces the right name in every environment.

Terraform
locals {
  automation_account_name = "aa-${var.workload}-${var.environment}-${var.region}-001"
}
Bicep
var automationAccountName = 'aa-${workload}-${environment}-${region}-001'

Generate Automation account names for your workload

Free, no login. Validation and Terraform, Bicep, or CSV export included.

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Related Management and governance resources

See the full list of Azure resource naming rules or read the complete CAF naming guide.