Cloud: Pets, Cattle and…Chickens? By @BernardGolden | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

If you’ve spent any time at leading cloud computing conferences, you may have come across the meme “pets vs cattle.” (Here is a lengthy slideshare presentation by Randy Bias of EMC/Cloudscaling discussing the difference between pets and cattle in a cloud computing world.) The message associated with this meme is that we should have different attitudes about traditional infrastructure versus today’s cloud infrastructure. Traditional infrastructure is expensive and individuated – we give servers names, we lavish attention on them, and when they suffer problems we do evaluation, diagnosis, and nurse them back to health via hands-on administration. In other words, we treat them as part of a family. This is true whether the server is physical or virtual; they are long-lived and stable, and therefore deserve personal attention and emotional attachment – just like a pet.

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