This reminds me of the "10th floor test" in Bootstrapping an infrastructure, a Lisa'98 paper which was pretty influential for me and a whole wave of sysadmins getting excited about this transition from individual machines to shapeless "infrastructure" where the individual machines mattered less.
It doesn't mention pets or cattle, but makes a similar point:
The test we used when designing infrastructures was "Can I grab a random machine and throw it out the tenth-floor window without adversely impacting users for more than 10 minutes?" If the answer to this was "yes", then we knew we were doing things right.
It doesn't mention pets or cattle, but makes a similar point:
The test we used when designing infrastructures was "Can I grab a random machine and throw it out the tenth-floor window without adversely impacting users for more than 10 minutes?" If the answer to this was "yes", then we knew we were doing things right.
http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap/bootstrap.ht...