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It's not "fashionable", as that would imply it's merely based on subjective taste. It's not like console or distro debates at all, which depend on the situation

It's not "fashionable", as that would imply it's merely based on subjective taste. It's not like console or distro debates at all, which depend on the situation and user preferences/taste. A system where you can blow away the server and automatically have a new instance recreated is objectively better than a bespoke server that needs someone to recreate everything. The less time I need to spend manually configuring and tending to systems, the better. This is objectively a better model for software infrastructure and deployment. These are literally machines, not cattle or pets or whatever.

krageon 4y ago
If it were better to the degree you pretend, we'd all use that. That is not the reality, as such we can expect the amount of better to be marginal at best.
- huimang 4y ago
  Sure, implementation is easier said than done. That doesn’t change that, conceptually, having machines that you can destroy and spin up new ones at will is much better than bespoke “pet” instances. The “pet” stuff is used until someone sets up e.g. Salt, Terraform/Ansible, plain bash scripts etc.
  - krageon 4y ago
    Some things are "obvious", but not or poorly measured and just assumed by everyone to be true.
pdntspa 4y ago
We engineers are absolutely fantastic at rationalizing subjective tastes. Stay at this game long enough and you start to see the yada yada about cycles (fashions) repeating themselves. Is this debate one? I don't know, but I suspect it to be so. Personally I don't think all the extra moving parts of having "cattle" are worth it unless you're trying to be like Youtube, and the reality is lots of folks think they are when they shouldn't. I'm also not OK with a pay-for-compute model, but I also understand that the accountants and bean counters love it. In my homelab and in every organization I've ever been a part of, there is a mix of both pets and cattle (servers) depending on need. (Although, maybe that applies to people too?) But drift too far in one direction or the other and you're going to be pissing a lot of people off that you don't need to be. In any case I think this tangent is bikeshedding. Which is another thing we engineers are great at. I should have realized how much one word could nerd-snipe

krageon 4y ago

If it were better to the degree you pretend, we'd all use that. That is not the reality, as such we can expect the amount of better to be marginal at best.

huimang 4y ago
Sure, implementation is easier said than done. That doesn’t change that, conceptually, having machines that you can destroy and spin up new ones at will is much better than bespoke “pet” instances. The “pet” stuff is used until someone sets up e.g. Salt, Terraform/Ansible, plain bash scripts etc.
- krageon 4y ago
  Some things are "obvious", but not or poorly measured and just assumed by everyone to be true.

pdntspa 4y ago

We engineers are absolutely fantastic at rationalizing subjective tastes. Stay at this game long enough and you start to see the yada yada about cycles (fashions) repeating themselves. Is this debate one? I don't know, but I suspect it to be so. Personally I don't think all the extra moving parts of having "cattle" are worth it unless you're trying to be like Youtube, and the reality is lots of folks think they are when they shouldn't. I'm also not OK with a pay-for-compute model, but I also understand that the accountants and bean counters love it. In my homelab and in every organization I've ever been a part of, there is a mix of both pets and cattle (servers) depending on need. (Although, maybe that applies to people too?) But drift too far in one direction or the other and you're going to be pissing a lot of people off that you don't need to be. In any case I think this tangent is bikeshedding. Which is another thing we engineers are great at. I should have realized how much one word could nerd-snipe