Pets and Cattle

Dec 7, 2016

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Practice of System and Network Administration, The: Volume 1: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT, 3rd Edition

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3.3 Desktops as Cattle

The concept of generic, replaceable machines was first used in desktop environments, long before the cattle and pets analogy was coined. We already discussed the importance of unifying workstation configurations in Chapter 1, “Climbing Out of the Hole,” and we’ll discuss it in greater detail in Chapter 8, “OS Installation Strategies.”

The benefits of generic desktops are manifold. Users benefit from improved customer support, as SAs are no longer struggling to learn and adapt to an infinite number of variations. Repairs happen faster because the IT staff has a single vendor repair procedure to navigate.

Contrast this to an environment where each PC is fully customized. Fixing a software problem is difficult because any change may break something else. It is difficult to know what “working” means when there is no understanding of what is on the machine. Support for older operating systems depends on finding someone on the IT team who remembers that OS.

Creating an environment where cattle are the norm is the primary focus of chapters in Part II, “Workstation Fleet Management,” and Part III, “Servers.” Chapter 11, “Workstation Standardization,” focuses on taking a fleet of workstations that are pets and bringing about unification.

Resetting to a More Uniform State

One of the things that made Apple iPads such a success is that they reset the clock on variation.

PCs had become so customizable that variations had gotten out of control. One of the downsides of competition is that companies compete by differentiating their products, which means making them unique and different. Hardware vendors had many variations and choices, each trying to appeal to different customer segments. Each new market that Microsoft addressed resulted in adding customizability features to attract those users. As a result, by 2005 the complexity of supporting a fleet of Windows machines required a fleet of IT professionals.

Apple iPads took us back to having one particular configuration with curated applications. The uniformity made them more stable and consistent, which then permitted us to focus on the applications, not the infrastructure. Apple retains tight control over the iPad environment so that when the company repeats Microsoft’s mistake, it will play out much more slowly.

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