A Few Words on Pets and Cattle
The pets vs cattle metaphor is not a new one, and with apologies to my vegan friends, not mine, but bears briefly repeating. Essentially, ssh-ing into a machine, configuring it just so, and naming it after something cute or an erudite allusion – that’s a pet. You’re sad if she dies, gets sick, or has her blinky red light go black. Cattle, on the other hand, sit in numbered racks and referenced as numbers perhaps concatenated with a machine class like cow_with_big_ram_and_ssd_00003. If a member of the herd dies, a replacement is provisioned and launches automagically. This analogy applies both in the cloud and corporate datacenters.