I don't see the contrast here. > proudly declares himself Unix herder You know what herder's herd? Cattle. Not pets. > wants to keep track of which systems a

I don't see the contrast here. > proudly declares himself Unix herder You know what herder's herd? Cattle. Not pets. > wants to keep track of which systems are important. I mean obviously? Industry does the same. Probably with automation, tools and tagging during provisioning. The pet mentality is when you create a beautiful handcrafted spreadsheet showing which services run on the server named "Mjolnir" and which services run on the server named "Valinor". The cattle mentality is when you have the same in a distributed key-value database with UUIDs instead of fancyful server names. Or the pet mentality is when you prefer to not shut down "Mjolnir" because it has more than 2 years of uptime or some other silly reason like that. (as opposed to not shutting it down because you know that you would loose more money that way than by risking it overheating and having to buy a new one.)