The History of Pets vs. Cattle ... And Using It Properly
11 likes15,091 views
The document discusses the history and evolution of the "pets vs cattle" metaphor for describing how servers are managed. Originally, servers were treated like pets that were individually cared for, but in modern cloud computing they are treated like cattle in a herd that can be replaced without individual attention when one goes down. This shift reflects how infrastructure has become automated, standardized and able to dynamically scale out on demand. The metaphor helped explain why cloud computing was different from traditional IT and how failures could be handled without impact.
The History of Pets vs. Cattle ... And Using It Properly
- 1. The History of Pets vs. Cattle Randy Bias Vice President September 30, 2016 OpenStack Days Seattle @randybias … & Using It Properly
- 2. Once upon a time … 2
- 3. Cloud was Hard to Explain 3
- 4. It Wasn’t Really About Buying Online Services 4 2012 How to explain … ??? It’s got to be simple. Dead simple.
- 5. I Went Looking for Inspiration 5 Bill Baker had a genius explanation for scale-out vs. scale-up
- 6. So I, um … Appropriated It 6 Randy Bias
- 7. And a Meme was Born… 7
- 8. How to Explain Why Cloud is Different 8 Hint: it’s about uniqueness
- 9. “ ” In the old way of doing things, we treat our servers like pets. For example, ‘Frodo’ the mail server. If Frodo goes down, it’s all hands on deck. The CEO can’t get his email and it’s the end of the world. In the new way, servers are numbered, like cattle in a herd. For example, www001 to www100. When one server goes down, it’s taken out back, shot, and replaced on the line. — Randy Bias (many hundreds of times from 2012-2016) 9
- 10. The Old Way: Assembly Line IT
- 11. 11 “Mode 1”, “The Second Platform”, “Legacy” GUI Driven Ticket Based Hand Crafted Reserved Scale-Up Smart Hardware Proprietary “Waterfall Ops” . . .
- 12. Each Server Built This Way is A “Pet” 12 “I love you!” • Unique & indispensable • Hand fed, hand-crafted • Examples: –mainframes –HA pairs (LB, firewall, etc.) –master/slave databases • A “herd” of cattle is not 2 servers
- 13. The New Way: Robotics Factory IT
- 14. “Mode 2”, “Third Platform”, “Cloud-Native” API Driven Self Service Automated On Demand Scale-Out Smart Apps Open Source Agile DevOps . . .
- 15. Every Server is Just Another Part of the Herd 15 “Lunch!” • “A herd” is just many homogeneous servers • 100% automated & designed to fail • Load balanced & multi-master • LB: svc discovery, DNS, H/W LB • Examples: - web server arrays - multi-master data stores (Cassandra) - Hadoop clusters
- 16. Pets vs Cattle 16 GUI Driven Ticket Based Hand Crafted Reserved Scale-Up Smart Hardware Proprietary “Waterfall Ops” . . . API Driven Self Service Automated On Demand Scale-Out Smart Apps Open Source Agile DevOps . . . Disposable, One of the Herd Unique and Indispensable
- 17. Our Brave New World 17 • Failures happen … always • Everything must fail without an impact: server components, servers, racks, datacenters … everything • And most importantly, apps must detect and route around these failures
- 18. The Fundamental Difference 18 The Old Way (inelastic) The New Way (elastic) 99.9% Applications 99.999% Infrastructure ($$$$) 99.999% Applications 99.5% Infrastructure ($) Responsibility Shift
- 19. Extending the Meme … Muddies the Water 19
- 20. An Example: Kubernetes “Pet Sets” 20 Stateful Applications supported by “Pet Sets” • Cassandra • Kafka • MongoDB These are Cattle-architected data store systems Source: K8s Blog: Stateful Applications in Containers!? Kubernetes 1.3 Says "Yes!”
- 21. The World’s Biggest Stateful System is … 21Cattle … All the Way Down
- 22. Getting Value from “Pets vs Cattle” 22
- 23. Respect the Meme 23 See Also: • http://tinyurl.com/history-pets-cattle • http://www.slideshare.net/randybias/pets-vs-cattle-the- elastic-cloud-story • http://www.lauradhamilton.com/servers-pets-versus-cattle • http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/18/ servers_pets_or_cattle_cern/ • http://www.slideshare.net/randybias/architectures-for-open- and-scalable-clouds