There is a cute name for, er, the two ways of naming systems: pets naming vs cattle naming [1]. I think naming after services is like pet naming, while naming t

There is a cute name for, er, the two ways of naming systems: pets naming vs cattle naming [1]. I think naming after services is like pet naming, while naming them by numbers is like cattle naming. Pets Service Model In the pets service model, each pet server is given a loving names like zeus, ares, hades, poseidon, and athena. They are “unique, lovingly hand-raised, and cared for, and when they get sick, you nurse them back to health”. You scale these up by making them bigger, and when they are unavailable, everyone notices. Examples of pet servers include mainframes, solitary servers, load balancers and firewalls, database systems, and so on. Cattle Service Model In the cattle service model, the servers are given identification numbers like web-01, web-02, web-03, web-04, and web-05, much the same way cattle are given numbers tagged to their ear. Each server is “almost identical to each other” and “when one gets sick, you replace it with another one”. You scale these by creating more of them, and when one is unavailable, no one notices. Examples of cattle servers include web server arrays, no-sql clusters, queuing cluster, search cluster, caching reverse proxy cluster, multi-master datastores like Cassandra, big-data cluster solutions, and so on. [1] https://medium.com/@Joachim8675309/devops-concepts-pets-vs-cattle-2380b5aab313 https://medium.com/@Joachim8675309/devops-concepts-pets-vs-c...