This page describes the naming convention for Compute Engine resources.
Resources are the fundamental components that make up a Cloud service or product. For example, resources on Compute Engine include but are not limited to:
- Disks and persistent disk snapshots
- Images
- Instance templates
- Instance groups
- Machine images
- Node groups and node templates
- VM instances (VMs)
To learn more about resources, see Global, regional, and zonal resources documentation.
Naming convention
When you create a new resource on Compute Engine, you have to provide properties such as a name for the resource.
For resources on Compute Engine, the resource name must meet the following format (unless specified differently in the documentation for creating that resource):
- Be 1-63 characters in length.
- Comply with RFC 1035 conventions.
- Match the regular expression
[a-z]([-a-z0-9]*[a-z0-9])?. This means that the first character must be a lowercase letter, and all the following characters must be hyphens, lowercase letters, or digits, except the last character, which cannot be a hyphen.