Pets, cattle, chickens, insects, and snowflakes

I first came across the pets versus cattle analogy back in 2012 from a slide deck published by Randy Bias. The slide deck was used during a talk Randy Bias gave at the cloudscaling conference on architectures for open and scalable clouds. Towards the end of the talk, he introduced the concept of pets versus cattle, which Randy attributes to Bill Baker who at the time was an engineer at Microsoft.

The slide deck primarily talks about scaling out and not up; let's go into this in a little more detail and discuss some of the additions that have been made since the presentation was first given five years ago.

Randy's slide deck can be found at https://www.slideshare.net/randybias/architectures-for-open-and-scalable-clouds.