immutable infrastructure

term

cloudops culture

An approach where servers are never modified in place; to change one, you replace it with a new build.

Captured in the phrase "cattle, not pets", immutable infrastructure avoids the drift and surprises of hand-patched machines by rebuilding from a known image every time. It makes deployments predictable and rollbacks trivial: just bring back the old image.

Also known as: immutable-infrastructure, cattle not pets, phoenix server

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