The most obvious conventions that may come into your mind are probably about filesystem hierarchy and user naming. If you are looking for such suggestions here, then you will be disappointed. There is, of course, a Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) that defines the directory structure and directory contents in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, but it is really hard to find the actual OS distribution that is fully compliant with FHS. If system designers and programmers cannot obey such standards, it is very hard to expect the same from its administrators. During my experience, I've seen application code deployed almost everywhere it is possible, including nonstandard custom directories in the root filesystem level. Almost always the people behind such decisions had really strong arguments for doing so. The only suggestions in this matter that I can give you are as follows:
- Choose wisely and avoid surprises.
- Be consistent across all of the available infrastructure of your project.
- Try to be consistent across your organization (the company you work in).
What really helps is to document conventions for your project. Just remember to make sure that this documentation is accessible for every interested team member and that everyone knows that such a document exists.
In the next section, we will discuss isolation.