Yesterday I attended a talk by Randy Bias of Cloudscaling. The talk was called “Pets vs. Cattle: The Elastic Cloud.”
I thought Randy’s perspective on infrastructure and system administration is really interesting, so I’m going to explain some of the key points that he shared with us yesterday…
Under the old-fashioned “enterprise computing” infrastructure model, servers were given cutesy names like “Cookie,” “Dakota,” “Reagan,” or “Aardvark.” Each server was procured individually and configured by hand (often by several different people)…
Instead of treating the machines as pets, Randy told the audience, we should be treating them as cattle.
Read more at Laura Hamilton’s blog.
