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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985·

If you don't enjoy it then what were you doing working at a datacenter?

I enjoyed server admin, "back in the day", when your servers were pets and not cattle. But of course we have to make tech just as expendable as our workers, business school demands it! What if your pet server gets hit by a digital bus?!

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Pet server classes is a much nicer concept anyway. I never liked the instance based personalization. Creating a machine, defining its class, and seeing it become a machine of its class is magical.

Of course, the newest idea is for creating and destroying machines automatically... that outside of the could is quite pointless but people want it anyway. I imagine seeing all that orchestration working must be even nicer than a machine autoconfiguring, but I am yet to see a place where it just works.

One argument for "cattle" servers on bare-metal is security. Being able to reset the machine to a clean, known-good state would clear any leftovers including potential malware. Having machines provisioned from images that include everything they need to run also means you don't even need to grant anyone root access (which you'd otherwise need to be able to audit so they don't leave anything malicious in there).

I, too, enjoy pet servers over cattle. But when important parts of modern life depends on servers, I can definitely see the rationale for cattle.

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