That's not what cattle vs pets is. Treating your app as cattle means that it deploys, terminates, and re-deploys with minimal thought at the time of where and h

That's not what cattle vs pets is. Treating your app as cattle means that it deploys, terminates, and re-deploys with minimal thought at the time of where and how. Your app shouldn't care which Kubernetes node it gets deployed to. There shouldn't be some stateful infrastructure that requires hand-holding (e.g. logging into a named instance to restart a specific service). Sometimes network partitions happen, a disk starts going bad, or some other funky state happens and you kill the Kubernetes pod and move on. You should try to fix mem leaks and other issues like the one you described, and sometimes you truly do need pets. Many apps can benefit from being treated like cattle, however. This article touched on the distinction and has plenty of associated links at the bottom: https://medium.com/@Joachim8675309/devops-concepts-pets-vs-cattle-2380b5aab313 https://medium.com/@Joachim8675309/devops-concepts-pets-vs-c...