Do you name your environment traditionally or how your project manager calls them? I mean:

• prod
• staging
• beta
• alpha
• dev

I think you should stop doing that! I did it for many years, but I realized that environments changes too quickly, and you will end up with a prod that is not prod anymore, and a staging that is not prod, or alpha that is not stable and so on.

So what should you do? I think you should figure out a theme and stick with it. You generate or download a dataset with a hundred name stick them into a Terraform file if you use Terraform and here you are your list of environments.

In Terraform, I also keep a list of available, busy and deprecated environment name and I move those according, so I can avoid reuse a name I already used.

A few ideas:

• vegetables
• islands
• candies or sweets

Currently, my environments are named after beaches, and it is a lot of fun to read on Slack things like: “I uploaded the API to sunset beach” or “do you mind to look at moonlight bay I think it runs too slow?”.

On top of that, you can make the other stockholders happy, pointing more traditional CNAME where they should go.