Great point, but just mentioning (nitpicking?) that I never heard about machines/containers referred to as "livestock", but rather in my milieu it's always "pets" vs "cattle". I now wonder if it's a geographical thing.
Great point, but just mentioning (nitpicking?) that I never heard about machines/containers referred to as "livestock", but rather in my milieu it's always "pets" vs "cattle". I now wonder if it's a geographical thing.
Yeah, the CERN talk* [0] coined the term Pets vs. Cattle analogy, and it was way before VMs were cheap on bare metal. I think the word just evolved as the idea got rooted in the community.
We use the same analogy for the last 20 years or so. Provisioning 150 cattle servers take 15 minutes or so, and we can provision a pet in a couple of hours, at most.
[0]: https://www.engineyard.com/blog/pets-vs-cattle/
*: Engine Yard post notes that Microsoft's Bill Baker used the term earlier, though CERN's date (2012) checks out with our effort timeline and how we got started.
First time I heard it was from Adrian Cockcroft in... I think 2012, he def was talking about it a lot in 2013/2014, looks like he got it from Bill. https://se-radio.net/2014/12/episode-216-adrian-cockcroft-on...
Randy Bias also claims authorship https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of...
this tweet by Tim Bell seems to indicate shared credit with Bill Baker and Randy Bias
https://x.com/noggin143/status/354666097691205633
@randybias @dberkholz CERN's presentation of pets and cattle was derived from Randy's (and Bill Baker's previously).
I didn't mean to dispute who said it first, but wanted to say that we took the terms from CERN, and we got them around the time of their talk.
Boxen? (Oxen)
AFAIK, Boxen is a permutation of Boxes, not Oxen.
There seems to be a pattern of humorous plurals in English where by analogy with ox ~ oxen you get -x ~ -xen: boxen, Unixen, VAXen.
Before you call this pattern silly, consider that the fairly normal plural “Unices” is by analogy with Latin plurals in -x = -c|s ~ -c|ēs, where I’ve expanded -x into -cs to make it clear that the Latin singular comprises a noun stem ending in -c- and a (nominative) singular ending -s, which does exist in Latin but is otherwise completely nonexistent in English. (This is extra funny for Unix < Unics < Multics.) Analogies are the order of the day in this language.
Yeah. After reading your comment, I thought "maybe the Xen hypervisor is named because of this phenomena". "xen" just means "many" in that context.
Also, probably because of approaching graybeard territory, Thinking about boxen of VAXen running UNIXen makes me feel warm and fuzzy. :D