NINANS, short for “Ninans Is Not A Naming Standard,” is a region-naming scheme designed for multi-cloud environments. It aims to address the inconsistent region naming used by public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud Platform, providing a unified, compact, machine-readable region code for cloud resource names. Its naming format is ${provider[2]}${service_qualifier[1]}${country[2]}${subdivision_or_compass_direction[3]}${numerical_qualifier[2]}, with a fixed total length of 10 characters.
The value of NINANS is not in offering a complex tool, but in defining a clear set of encoding rules. It emphasizes being concise, compatible, machine readable, and predictable: it uses only lowercase letters and numbers, starts with a letter, and keeps both the full string and each component at fixed lengths. Geographic locations are based as much as possible on ISO 3166-1 and ISO 3166-2 standards. Fields include the cloud provider code, service qualifier, country code, administrative subdivision or compass direction, and the cloud provider’s native numerical qualifier. For example, AWS eu-west-2 can be represented as awsgblnd02.
The documentation lists provider codes for AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud Platform, and provides service qualifier examples such as Azure Jio, Azure EUAP, AWS GovCloud, and AWS secret/iso partitions. It is suitable for embedding into infrastructure as code, host naming, resource name prefixes, or internal CMDB rules. However, the page does not mention Terraform modules, a CLI, API, SDK, or automated region-mapping tools, nor does it explain any integration with Kubernetes, CI/CD, or cloud provider APIs.
The documentation does not include any commercial pricing information and shows a GitHub source link, so it appears more like a public specification or open-source project. However, the captured content does not provide a license, repository address, release versions, maintainers, or contribution process, so its open-source licensing terms cannot be confirmed. There is also no information about payment methods.
The main advantages are that the rules are short and highly compatible, making them especially useful in environments with hostname length limits such as NetBIOS. Fixed fields make the codes easy to parse programmatically, and the use of ISO standards reduces ambiguity from ad hoc naming. The drawbacks are that it is not an official standard, its adoption level is unclear, and it is not obvious how mappings will be maintained as cloud regions continue to expand. Users also need to understand ISO subdivisions, special partitions, and cloud provider region numbering, so there is some learning curve for first-time use.
It is suitable for multi-cloud infrastructure teams, platform engineering teams, cloud governance teams, and developers who want to encode region information into resource names. It is less suitable for teams that use only a single cloud provider and already rely entirely on that provider’s native region naming. The documentation does not state how accessible it is from China. Access to the domain and GitHub may vary across network environments, so this is marked as unknown. Alternatives include internal enterprise naming standards, Terraform/Cloud Posse Label systems, or directly using each cloud provider’s official region names.
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