[carbonguy]

This post resonated with me, as it seems to have done with many of us. My way out of the prison was giving up on "cattle not pets" - I had to acknowledge that I will never, ever need the ability to spin up or spin down a herd of containers or automatically configure a thousand of anything or whatever is understood by the "cattle" archetype. I've got the handful of services that I care about, running based on manual configurations, which I don't even bother to back up - and the hobby has remained fun!

[travisjungroth]

Maybe if the mantra was “Cattle or pets?” that would help people. Neither is wrong, it’s just a mindset that a lot of decisions flow from.

I think what happened was people working on lots of servers realized they were taking care of them in a way that was labor intensive per unit (pets). They needed to work at a distance, in a way that worked on the whole group at once (cattle).

Then, you get the “cattle not pets” mantra, as if it’s inherently bad. But it’s not! If you have two units, take care of them like you have two units, whether it’s servers or cows.

“We’re taking care of these 100 servers like we have two! This is dumb!”

“I’m taking care of these two servers like I have 100! This is dumb!”

And back and forth.