pets vs cattle

https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/pets-vs-cattle

As Massimo points out, once you have that analogy in mind, it’s easy to determine whether you’re dealing with pets or cattle. Ask yourself this: what would happen if several of your servers went offline right now? If such a thing would go unnoticed by your end-users, then you are dealing with cattle. If it would cause a major disruption for your end-users, you have pets.

It also provides a template for thinking about your architecture. You can look at a server and ask yourself: what would I do if this got sick? The answer you’re looking for is: terminate it immediately and replace it with a new one. If you’re worrying about backups, data dumps, scheduled downtime, or tedious manual reconfiguration, that should be a red flag.