Comparison
Cattle not petsvsSnowflake server
Cattle not pets
nobody knows the names of the machines, and the fix for a sick one is to terminate it rather than to log in.
The doctrine that infrastructure should be numerous, identical and disposable rather than individually named and nursed. It is a statement about operational posture rather than technology: the test is whether replacing any given machine is a routine, automated non-event. Where it fails is where it always fails — the one host with something on its local disk that nobody has written down.
Full entry →Snowflake server
there is one machine everyone is afraid to reboot, and its configuration exists only in the history of who logged in.
A host whose configuration has diverged so far through manual changes that it cannot be reproduced. It is the direct output of in-place changes over years, and the risk is not that it is unusual but that it is unrecoverable — a hardware failure becomes an archaeology project. The standard remedy is to rebuild it from code once, deliberately, while it is still working rather than after it is not.
Full entry →