Questions tagged [cattle-vs-pet]

Cattle vs. Pets is a description of two ways of treating infrastructure. Pets are fed, nurtured and given names ultimately resulting in unique servers that become hard to maintain. Cattle, on the other hand, are numbers on a sheet when they don't function they are disposed of.

Cattle vs. Pets is a description of two ways of treating infrastructure. Pets are fed, nurtured and given names ultimately resulting in unique servers that become hard to maintain. Cattle, on the other hand, are numbers on a sheet when they don't function they are disposed of.

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What is the definition of "cattle not pets"?

The term "treat your servers like cattle not pets" has proliferated in recent years, particularly when applied to Docker containers and Virtual Machines What does it actually mean?
Richard Slater
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What are the reasons Docker should not be used for databases?

I'm having a discussion with a friend about use cases for Docker. One guy in the team wants to use Docker for everything - like a kind of universal unix process wrapper. The other thinks that Docker should only be used for stateless applications…
hawkeye
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A comparison of idempotence and immutability

Many in the DevOps apply the cattle-not-pets mentality by implementing immutable infrastructure and redeploying when changes are needed (instead of modifying). Configuration management has a similar principle of idempotence. What are the comparative…
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Does the "cattle not pets" distinction apply as equally to machine instances as to containers?

There is a great discussion of the Cattle vs Pets distinction from Randy Bias here. Martin Fowler talks about a SnowFlakeServer. In a series of talks, Adrian Cockcroft talks about how they moved toward Cattle Servers for solving a scalability…
hawkeye
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