[dashwav]

https://devops.stackexchange.com/questions/653/what-is-the-d...

This is a pretty good in depth explanation, but at a high level if a your server dies and you are extremely upset about it (similar to if your pet died) you are putting too many eggs in that single basket, with no secondary plan. Conversely if you build your infra in such a way that your server dying is something you see no worse than how a farmer sees one of his cattle dying (which are raised to be killed) - you are much better prepared for the inevitable downtime from your server and can very easily recover

[rexreed]

I think a pets vs. corn would be a better analogy as it's a high value single instance vs. a commodity farm.