Pets vs Cattle (and ITSM)
With the advent of cloud computing (regardless whether it is private, public like AWS, Rackspace, etc, or hybrid) a popular meme has arisen to "treat your servers like cattle, not as pets". This meme suggests that IT organisations should change their views (and therefore behaviors) with servers in the cloud by not treating servers as their favourite pets, but rather act like farmers and view their servers as cattle. There are several blog posts already on this topic by authors like Mark Needham , Greg Ferro , Massino , Simon Sharwood . The slide below from Gavin McCance from CERN provides a great, single image of the meme. His presentation titled “ CERN Data Centre Evolution ” detailed the scientific organisation's 12,000-odd servers and plans to manage them more efficiently. From this slide, you probably now understand the meme: If pets are sick, we nurse them back to health. If cattle are sick, we destroy them (sounds harsh, but we can spin up new servers