There is a great discussion of the Cattle vs Pets distinction from Randy Bias here. Martin Fowler talks about a SnowFlakeServer.
In a series of talks, Adrian Cockcroft talks about how they moved toward Cattle Servers for solving a scalability problem at Netflix.
The challenge with this distinction is always managing persistent state. Does it make sense to treat your database servers as Cattle? It does if you (a) manage the state outside of your cattle model (external volumes for your docker containers), or (b) use a distributed database like Cassandra that allows for individual nodes to fail, but still maintain state in the cluster.
I get that you can get very close to the 'disposability with persistent state' of Docker containers mounting a shared volume, with launching AMIs to machine instances mounting a shared drive. You can get closer this this idea of scheduled cluster management by having an autoscaling group that recreates machines that you've blown away.
To me - the machine instances lack the granularity of a docker container. They gravitate more towards the 'pets' end of the spectrum.
My question is: Does the "cattle not pets" distinction apply as equally to machine instances as to containers?
