pets vs. cattle

cloudops culture

The cloud-era doctrine: treat servers as interchangeable cattle to be replaced, not named pets to be nursed.

Popularized in early-2010s cloud circles by Randy Bias, who credits Bill Baker's SQL Server talk, the metaphor divides infrastructure into pets (unique, hand-configured, lovingly restored when sick) and cattle (numbered, identical, destroyed and replaced on failure). It is the cultural core of immutable infrastructure, autoscaling, and configuration as code. When an engineer SSHes into production to fix one box by hand, a pet has been born.

Also known as: cattle not pets

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