
Pets vs. Cattle - nslater
https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/pets-vs-cattle
======
danielsiders
edit: apparently it's Bill Baker of Microsoft who originated it:
[https://www.pistoncloud.com/2013/04/announcing-enterprise-
op...](https://www.pistoncloud.com/2013/04/announcing-enterprise-openstack-
version-2/)

Afaik the analogy was first used by Joshua McKenty of Piston Cloud

'"The servers in today's data center are like puppies -- they've got names and
when they get sick, everything grinds to a halt while you nurse them back to
health," Joshua McKenty, co-founder of Piston Cloud, is quoted as saying in a
recent company press release. "Piston Enterprise OpenStack is a system for
managing your servers like cattle -- you number them, and when they get sick
and you have to shoot them in the head, the herd can keep moving. It takes a
family of three to care for a single puppy, but a few cowboys can drive tens
of thousands of cows over great distances, all while drinking whiskey."'[1]

[1] [https://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/041113-servers-
cows-p...](https://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/041113-servers-cows-
puppies-268650.html)

~~~
ArbitraryLimits
Unlike the iPad, the iPhone, Dropbox, and "The Web," credit for this metaphor
may fairly be given to David Gelertner. Although he applied it to naming files
rather than servers.

From [http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-second-coming-a-
manifes...](http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-second-coming-a-manifesto)
(1999)

> If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of
> cattle, don't bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on
> your computer is ridiculous.

For what it's worth he was also the first to use the metaphor of a cloud,
although in his sense the cloud represented your personal data and it drifted
to follow you, casting a shadow over pavestones representing computers, as
opposed to the usual sense of the cloud being an amorphous body of computers.

~~~
Dylan16807
That's not really the same metaphor. The naming is almost incidental, it's the
individual effort going into each item that matters. Most of my 'pet' files
are nameless, but they are individually pampered and treated and difficult to
recreate.

------
drakaal
I don't have a citation, but I used this analogy in 1999 for terminal server
as a replacement for desktops.

Y2K was pushing people to dump whole networks. Rather than upgrade people were
just buying all new, but losing data on the machines was a huge scary thing.
And migration tools sucked at the time.

[http://www.cdstoledo.com/](http://www.cdstoledo.com/) where I was working at
the time, under my direction started to role out commodity computers.
Computers that used Hardware Compatibility list components, and were
supplemented with Terminal services to allow important data to always be
backed up "in the cloud".

When a computer "died" or had an issue, we could just swap the hardware. No
local files were needed as everything was on the server as either part of the
Terminal Services, or a Roaming Profile. We could then fix the computer at the
shop quickly.

It had highs and lows. At the time it meant better service at a lower price.
But that meant less money for the company. We could offset this to some
degree, but the reliability was so high that in many cases we ended up with
support contracts that wouldn't get renewed because the hardware never needed
support.

I can't claim that I invented the analogy. I think someone at Microsoft told
it to me when they pitched terminal services to me. Or maybe I pitched it to
them, being a farm boy as I was.

In any event it is an analogy that is 15 years old at minimum.

~~~
nslater
Ooh. That's a great anecdote. Thanks for sharing!

------
bguthrie
Another term for this is "snowflake server"––every one's a little bit
different. Good for skiing, bad for a data center.
[http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html)

~~~
Kudos
An extension of this is The Noflake Manifesto
[http://noflake.org/](http://noflake.org/)

~~~
nslater
This is fantastic. Thanks. I will integrate this into my next post.

------
shykes
This reminds me of the "10th floor test" in _Bootstrapping an infrastructure_
, a Lisa'98 paper which was pretty influential for me and a whole wave of
sysadmins getting excited about this transition from individual machines to
shapeless "infrastructure" where the individual machines mattered less.

It doesn't mention pets or cattle, but makes a similar point:

 _The test we used when designing infrastructures was "Can I grab a random
machine and throw it out the tenth-floor window without adversely impacting
users for more than 10 minutes?" If the answer to this was "yes", then we knew
we were doing things right._

[http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap/bootstrap.ht...](http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap/bootstrap.html)

~~~
nslater
Hah! That's cool. Thanks!

------
camillomiller
The disposable nature of factory farmed cattles is so common and accepted
knowledge, that it's ok to make crappy analogies out of it. That's
particularly sad because it's the idea of an extremely smart mind.

~~~
protomyth
Well, given 20,0000[1] head of cattle died[2] in a early blizzard (October 4,
2013) in South Dakota and it wasn't the number one story on any national news
site pretty much tells you where cattle rate.

1) estimates go from 10,000 to 100,000 depending on source - it seems like
20,000 was the conservative estimate by veterinarians

2) cattle hadn't grown winter coats, rain, 70mph wind, snow = frozen cattle
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131022-cattl...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131022-cattle-
blizzard-south-dakota-winter-storm-atlas/)

[edit: these were in the summer pastures still and I doubt they'd be defined
as factory farmed cattle]

~~~
zeckalpha
It's mostly the rain that got to them. Cattle have been genetically
engineered, I mean bred, for cold tolerance. They can't handle moisture
combined with the cold.

~~~
protomyth
They didn't have their winter coats and it was early enough that they were
still in the summer pastures, so later in the year, even with the rain, they
would have been fine.

------
csbrooks
I liked this analogy, and found it informative.*

*Not a farmer, not a vegetarian, just a programmer.

------
beat
I like this analogy... puts words around a concern of mine. I'm building a
startup around dealing with server configuration problems, but the problems
tend to be more "pet" problems than "cattle" problems. In fact, my primary
competition is switching from pets to cattle.

So I'm thinking hard about how to best apply my idea to cattle as well as
pets, to reach a larger market and take advantage of industry trends.

------
dmourati
Anyone have any tips on how to make the transition from pets to cattle? I ask
because we are a cloud deployed company (EC2) still largely doing things in an
old-school "pets" based approach. I'm fully onboard for why the cattle
approach is better. Getting there, on the other hand, is non-trivial.

~~~
nslater
I hope to cover this in my subsequent posts. Stay tuned!

------
beachstartup
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7313882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7313882)

this was on the front page for a brief moment, but apparently engine yard's
attitude that servers are cattle had fairly disastrous consequences for
Groove.

------
Patrick_Devine
We named our (soon to be announced) start-up after this principle. The company
is called "Netkine", as in a kine of cattle on the net.

That, and we thought it sounded kind of cool.

