We all know the drill by now: modern compute infrastructure needs to be deterministic, disposable, commoditised and repeatable. We’re all farmers now, and our server estates must be treated like cattle – ready for slaughter at a moment’s notice.
However, we must remember that the driver behind the new design rationale is primarily the unreliable nature of modern cloud compute infrastructure and its associated feeble Service-level agreements (SLAs). Let’s just take a step back from the cattle over pets mantra for a moment, and evaluate if this is really always the right path to be going down.
Temple computing
In past times, deployment engineers would carefully plan and rehearse making their prostrations before the software release altar, and once ever so gently lowered into place, would back slowly away from the new running service, all the while making their benedictions.
The entire process was usually a manual one, possibly documented to some extent in a runbook,…