Suggestion: Machine naming convention for human operators

[containerops]

Just a minor NIT, but I don’t find the current machine naming convention human-friendly. The autogenerated machine names are random and lack any meaningful information. I understand that renaming machines using fly m clone is an easy workaround, but fly deploy is sufficient for most use cases, and it’s only getting better (bluegreen deployments ).

Why not consider adopting a naming convention more similar to Heroku or Kubernetes? For example, Kubernetes roughly names pods as <replica-set-name>-<random-string>.

I would love having something similar to:

# Kubernetes-ish:
# <app-name>-<process-group-name>-<random-string>

myapp-web-k6qm4
myapp-web-v3r9w
myapp-web-r9g8j

myapp-worker-6f7wt
myapp-worker-8v5l4

For comparison, here is the current naming approach:

fragrant-glade-717
lingering-hill-514
white-sound-9017

dawn-wind-1868
misty-sun-4802

[ignoramous]

@containerops

The autogenerated machine names are random and lack any meaningful information.

It’d have been okay if it were random, but they aren’t. There’s information packed in those IDs. I think, for ops where flyctl / the api endpoint requires machine-ids, it could also accept machine-names, which are their human-readable counterpart.

Prior art:

@ignoramous

It’d be nice if we could use Machine names instead of IDs that increasingly have a lot of hex chars common for some reason. I always have to double check the ID before execing some of the more onerous commands (remove -f for example): [FR] flyctl m update with machine-name · Issue #1293 · superfly/flyctl · GitHub (I volunteer to impl if this is something that folks at Fly are open to merging).