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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

> not unlike this whole stupid pets-vs-cattle debate with servers

What am I missing here? Those are in no way whatsoever related. One is a group of humans and the other is a group of machines, the rules/expectations are 100% different. You should not treat humans are replaceable cogs for moral reasons and the very real reason that they simply aren't. Humans are not 1 to 1 comparable (not that it would be ok to dehumanize them if they weren't) so that way of thinking is not only gross but it's silly/short sighted/wrong. I've seen companies treat employees as cogs then be all surprised when they fire/layoff one of those "cogs" which causes a mass exodus (sometimes resulting in literal decades of experience walking out the door in the span of months).

Servers/computers are a whole different ball game. For all intents and purposes a server is a server is a server (blah, blah, same instance size, disk, etc).

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That was the point. You should not treat humans like you treat machines but this happens all the time.

Hmm, I read it as "just they wanted to treat humans as 'fungible, replaceable cogs in the machine' it's stupid that some people want to do the same things with server". I think the "stupid" modifier is what really pushed me to think that was the case as I don't think the pets-vs-cattle debate for servers is stupid, it makes a lot of sense.

I think that both mentalities with regards to servers have their place, but right now it is very fashionable to bash servers as "pets". Like Windows vs Mac or Playstation vs Xbox, the debate itself is stupid. For either humans or servers, everyone wants to commoditize them.

Maybe stupid isnt the best word but I feel strongly in both cases.

If you think "treat servers as cattle" is stupid or has no merit, I question your credentials.

Decoupling config, app state and the app itself has a lot of upside in certain cases.

For some people servers have their individual "servernalities".

Like all metaphors, the pets vs. cattle one started to break down if you poked at it too hard. But it came from a place where individual servers were highly valued and were often at least somewhat unique. Standard operating environments had been around for a while but the "monitor the server's health and nurse it back to health if something's wrong" sentiment was still pretty widespread.

Even redundancy tended to be hardware-based to a significant degree. How much did the IT industry put into things like failover Unix clusters (and VAX/VMS etc. before that) over the years?

The difference is that servers are cogs in a machine. It's often desirable to treat them as fungible and interchangeable, and there are no ethical problems with doing so.

What if the server has AI and a name?

Current AI are cattle, it doesn't matter if you shut it down or put it up on 100 different servers, it behaves the same.

When it starts to have memory, develops a personality and identity - I can see some people might care for certain instances of AI as pets. Like that Japanese guy who married a robot (or was it a hologram), then the company deprecated the software and it stopped working (or disappeared).

The fact that humans can develop emotional bonds with machines and objects is strange and fascinating.

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.

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.

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.

Some things are "obvious", but not or poorly measured and just assumed by everyone to be true.

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

My interpretation was "at least we treat servers like living things, can't say the same for how business managers treat employees"

"One is a group of humans and the other is a group of machines, the rules/expectations are 100% different."

This is exactly what they were saying in the comment you are replying to.

Aren't you just agreeing with the post you're replying to here, or am I missing something? Both of you make the central point that humans and servers are fundamentally different and that descisions that involve humans must invariably have a moral dimaneion as far as I can see.

Maybe I did misinterpret, see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33122403

I took OP the same way, probably because of the use of the word "stupid" to describe the pets-vs-cattle debate. It felt to me that OP was drawing an analogy between said "stupid" debate and the way MBAs discuss employees, rather than drawing a contrast between the two.

Treating servers as cattle is the same black and white thinking as treating humans as resources. Servers require considered care and if you outsource that you get what you get at some operational expense.

If someone calls your idiom of choice stupid and this makes you feel any type of way at all it might be time for a breather.

Are you arguing or reiterating?

What am I missing here?

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