Database Cattle

  • Cattle are eminently replaceable to cattle farmers. They live with the idea that some will die, hence the need to have multiple cattle in a herd. We're not talking about wiping out every system. That's not the analogy, and if a cattle farmer loses all cattle or a company loses all servers, they're probably done. This is about any particular item not really mattering. If I lose one, I replace it.

    This is the point I think people are missing with the analogy.  It's not about whether the business or the farmer can handle / survive the loss of the entire server farm / herd, it's being able to quickly and easily recover from one member of the herd dying.

    It's the difference between losing a production server, then spending days, weeks, or longer trying to get it back into the state it was, or having a conversation with the boss like "Yeah, production server Alpha13 was blue-screening every time it started up, so we dropped the VM, ran the build script for it and restored the most recent database backups and had it back up in a couple hours, and we only lost about 20 minutes of data."  So instead of the loss of a server being a potential resume generating event, it becomes almost nothing more than water cooler conversation.

  • jasona.work - Monday, March 13, 2017 7:41 AM

    Cattle are eminently replaceable to cattle farmers. They live with the idea that some will die, hence the need to have multiple cattle in a herd. We're not talking about wiping out every system. That's not the analogy, and if a cattle farmer loses all cattle or a company loses all servers, they're probably done. This is about any particular item not really mattering. If I lose one, I replace it.

    This is the point I think people are missing with the analogy.  It's not about whether the business or the farmer can handle / survive the loss of the entire server farm / herd, it's being able to quickly and easily recover from one member of the herd dying.

    It's the difference between losing a production server, then spending days, weeks, or longer trying to get it back into the state it was, or having a conversation with the boss like "Yeah, production server Alpha13 was blue-screening every time it started up, so we dropped the VM, ran the build script for it and restored the most recent database backups and had it back up in a couple hours, and we only lost about 20 minutes of data."  So instead of the loss of a server being a potential resume generating event, it becomes almost nothing more than water cooler conversation.

    Spot on. Sometimes analogies take the focus away from the real discussion point and that's what I feel has occurred here.

    We should expect servers to fail and have a repeatable process for bringing their replacement online.

    If you really want a pet then take the carcass of the decommissioned server back to your desk. :laugh:

    Gaz

    -- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

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