💡
Bill Baker, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, quipped that we used to treat servers like pets: "You name them and when they get sick, you nurse them back to health. [Now] servers are [treated] like cattle. You number them and when they get sick, you shoot them." By having repeatable environment creation systems, we are able to easily increase capacity by adding more servers into rotation (i.e., horizontal scaling). We also avoid the disaster that inevitably results when we must restore service after a catastrophic failure of irreproducible infrastructure, created through years of undocumented and manual production changes.