Chapter 11. Embracing Destruction: Pets versus Cattle

Any roles involved in a project that do not directly contribute toward the goal of putting valuable software in the hands of users as quickly as possible should be carefully considered.                                                                                                           -Stein Inge Morisbak

 

We should discuss the high-level strategies before we start exploring tools and processes that will help us create and operate a "real" Swarm cluster. How are we going to treat our servers? Are they going to be pets or cattle?

How do you know whether you are treating your servers as pets or cattle? Ask yourself the following question. What will happen if several of your servers went offline right now? If they are pets, such a situation will cause a significant disruption for your users. If they are cattle, such an outcome will go unnoticed. Since you are running multiple instances of a service distributed across multiple nodes,...