Allow generation of stable but unique name for resources

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Generating globally unique names for resources that require a (globally unique) dns entry is challenging. In ARM templates, I would use the uniqueString function, seeding it with the “name” of the storage account (and possibly containing resource group name) that I want to create in order to get a “presudo-random” (but stable) name. Attempting to do so from a shell script is annoying.

Describe the solution you’d like It would be of a lot of value to expose the functionality from the az create commands - e.g. az storage account create -g somegroup -n somename --uniqify-name

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

• Make name optional and default it to a uniqueString equivalent.
• Provide an az name create --resource-group some group --name someame

Additional context

[jiasli]

@nthewara, currently there is no plan to implement such feature due to other high priority tasks. Also, adding --uniqify-name argument would require changes in all mgmt-plane commands’ --name arguments, or possibly even --vnet-name from az network vnet subnet create, --account-name from az storage container create. This will certainly make commands exponentially more complicated.

We recommend using your own hash function to achieve the same effect.

I wrote a sample Python script using hashlib and base64 to mimic the behavior of uniqueString:

# unique_string.py

import base64
import hashlib
import sys

str_to_hash = ''.join(sys.argv)

# Use sha1 algorithm to compute the hash in bytes
hash_bytes = hashlib.sha1(str_to_hash.encode()).digest()

# Compute the base32-encoded hash
hash_str = base64.b32encode(hash_bytes).decode()

# Only use the first 13 character
print(hash_str[:13].lower())

To invoke it:

# PowerShell

> python unique_string.py myresourcegroup mystorageaccount
k6b3wuaabd6k6

> $rg_id=az group show --name rg0823 --query id --output tsv
> python unique_string.py $rg_id
epthnx6bnawq7

Of course, you may tweak the script to customize it to suit your needs.

[nthewara]

@yonzhan @qianwens - Any update on this ? This would be good feature to have specifically when we need to re-run cli scripts