The IATA code thing seems a bit wobbly. Am i really going to sit and work out if our datacentre in Sutton is closer to Heathrow or City airports?
We name our datacentres with a two-letter city code and a digit (or some letters and then some digits in your framework!). The city codes aren't from any canonical list, but it turns out there aren't enough to matter. So far, this has served equally well at avoiding arguments about what to call things.
We name machines ${datacentre}-${other_stuff}. That makes it trivial to tell what exact datacentre a machine is in. That's very nice if you have to reason about networking. In your scheme, if you had multiple datacentres near one airport, you would have to know the mapping from cluster to datacentre, right?
The usual (and suboptimal) solution to that one is to just use the biggest airport in the metro area -- e.g. servers in Chicago are tagged ORD even if they happen to be located next door to Midway.
However, IATA does provide city codes even if no airport in that city actually uses them. London's is LON, Chicago's is CHI. It's better to just use those.
Same. Biggest airport in the area unless the data center is somehow VERY close to a secondary airport or something.
Can't speak to others but one of the main reasons is if our team has to fly chances are they're hitting the main airport, anyway. Like, we're not going to try to finagle a Spirit or RyanAir flight, just fly to ORD and taxi / uber. For someone looking to travel on the cheap and with no concerns about time those airlines and airports are fine, but work demands change that math.
We name our datacentres with a two-letter city code and a digit (or some letters and then some digits in your framework!). The city codes aren't from any canonical list, but it turns out there aren't enough to matter. So far, this has served equally well at avoiding arguments about what to call things.
We name machines ${datacentre}-${other_stuff}. That makes it trivial to tell what exact datacentre a machine is in. That's very nice if you have to reason about networking. In your scheme, if you had multiple datacentres near one airport, you would have to know the mapping from cluster to datacentre, right?