Comparison
Golden imagevsImmutable infrastructure
Golden image
the machine boots already containing the agent, the runtime and the hardening, so start-up is thirty seconds rather than six minutes.
A pre-built machine or container image containing everything common to a fleet, so instances need no configuration at boot. It makes scaling fast and start-up deterministic, and it moves the work into a build pipeline that has to run on a schedule to pick up patches. Its failure mode is a stale image nobody rebuilds, which quietly becomes the oldest and least patched thing in the estate.
Full entry →Immutable infrastructure
you never patch a running server; you build a new image and replace the instance entirely.
Treating deployed artefacts as read-only and replacing rather than modifying them. It eliminates configuration drift and makes environments reproducible from source. It requires the build and replace cycle to be fast, and it makes stateful nodes the special case that needs a real plan.
Full entry →