alt Hacker NewsWhat you describe is from the "pets" era of server deployment, and we are now deep into the "cattle" era. Train yourself on destroying and redeploying, and building observability into the stack from the outset, rather than managing a server through ssh. Every shop you go to professionally is going to work like this. Eventually, Linux desktops will work like this also, especially with all the work going into systemd to support movable home directories, immutable OS images with modular updates, and so forth.
Replies
> What you describe is from the "pets" era of server deployment, and we are now deep into the "cattle" era.
You still need to be able to work with individual servers. Saying "they're cattle, not pets" is just being a lazy sysadmin.
I already do this professionally, and when something is broken, we collectively as an industry have no idea why except for rolling back to a previous deployment because we have no time for system introspection, nor do we really want to spend engineering hours figuring it out. Just nuke it.
The bigger joke is everyone behaves like they have a ranch for all this cattle infrastructure.
In reality, the largest clients by revenue in the world have PetSmart. And frankly many of them, a fish bowl.
I don't think this viewpoint is very pragmatic. "Pet" and "cattle" approaches solve different scales of problems. Shops should be adaptable to using either for the right job.