cattle, not pets

cloudops culture

The mindset that servers should be disposable and interchangeable, not lovingly maintained individuals.

A pet server has a name, gets nursed back to health when sick, and is irreplaceable; cattle are numbered, identical, and simply replaced when one fails. The analogy captures the shift to immutable, automated infrastructure where you rebuild rather than repair.

Also known as: pets vs cattle, cattle not pets

← All glossary entries