> IATA code (3 characters)
What do you do if there's no airport?
What do you do if there's no airport?
The purpose is to have a Schelling point that bypasses any tedious weeks-long arguments. Otherwise your Frankfurt datacenter gets named "ceurope" because the London datacenter got "europe" first, or you named the Ohio datacenter "east" and there's a fight about whether to call the new Virginia datacenter "easter".
[0] If you're building a submerged datacenter in the middle of the Atlantic then ... well, do your best.
If you have to do all this guesswork or refer to documentation anyway, maybe just use the human readable and immediately interpretable name of the town the DC is in. Increment a number for each new DC in the area. No cognitive hoops to jump through.
How many San Joses in the world? (1700ish)
Pennsylvania has two Baldwins, two Whitehalls and two Elizabeths.
UN/LOCODE tends to have an abbreviation for most places.
> The codes are chosen, according to the ISO 3166/MA, "to reflect the significant, unique component of the country name in order to allow a visual association between country name and country code".[5] For this reason, common components of country names like "Republic", "Kingdom", "United", "Federal" or "Democratic" are normally not used for deriving the code elements. As a consequence, for example, the United Kingdom is officially assigned the alpha-2 code GB rather than UK, based on its official name "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (although UK is reserved on the request of the United Kingdom). Some codes are chosen based on the native names of the countries. For example, Germany is assigned the alpha-2 code DE, based on its native name "Deutschland".
UN/LOCODE may be more appropriate:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN/LOCODE
* https://unece.org/trade/cefact/unlocode-code-list-country-an...
Has both country code and location with-in that.