<story><title>RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990)</title><url>https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SteveNuts</author><text>That goes against the paradigm. I prefer that my hostnames are ambiguous, that way I&amp;#x27;m forced to write tools to automate administrative tasks.&lt;p&gt;If I know the hostname I or my team will be tempted to make one-off changes, breaking the whole &amp;quot;cattle&amp;quot; idea.</text></item><item><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>Depends how you mean that; I would rather a machine be named prod-app-web-7 than af74b9c. At least mark the cattle by breed!</text></item><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>This reminds me of the Pets vs Cattle analogy &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.engineyard.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;pets-vs-cattle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.engineyard.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;pets-vs-cattle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;With a pet, you obsess over the name and meaning of the name. With cattle, as long as names don&amp;#x27;t collide or cause problems, you couldn&amp;#x27;t care less about the name.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deathanatos</author><text>It is still helpful to have decent names even if you&amp;#x27;re treating your machines like &amp;quot;cattle&amp;quot; instead of like &amp;quot;pets&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Inevitably, some bug will occur, and in my experience, it usually happens to occur on a machine (rather than all of them at once; I&amp;#x27;m not saying this machine is &lt;i&gt;special&lt;/i&gt; — the bug &lt;i&gt;could&lt;/i&gt; have happened on any of them, and likely exists on all of them because they&amp;#x27;re all running the same code, but this particular machine ended up being the lucky one to serve that slightly unusual request).&lt;p&gt;Getting in and debugging the state of that machine, pulling logs, directing a coworker to look at CPU detail &amp;quot;frobnozz&amp;quot;, etc. is all easier if I can easily speak or type out the machine&amp;#x27;s name. &amp;quot;3.dev.microservice&amp;quot; is much easier to type&amp;#x2F;speak than say, an IP address, an EC2 instance ID, etc.&lt;p&gt;(I &lt;i&gt;fully&lt;/i&gt; agree on not making one-off changes, and not treating machines as pets. But I think that even after that, decent naming has a place.)&lt;p&gt;And even with cattle, the other way, I still think it&amp;#x27;s useful for the name to provide &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; information. I.e., 3.prod.microservice being the third or fourth instance of the production setup of &amp;quot;microservice&amp;quot; is better than say, some random entry from the periodic table of elements.</text></comment>
<story><title>RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990)</title><url>https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>SteveNuts</author><text>That goes against the paradigm. I prefer that my hostnames are ambiguous, that way I&amp;#x27;m forced to write tools to automate administrative tasks.&lt;p&gt;If I know the hostname I or my team will be tempted to make one-off changes, breaking the whole &amp;quot;cattle&amp;quot; idea.</text></item><item><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>Depends how you mean that; I would rather a machine be named prod-app-web-7 than af74b9c. At least mark the cattle by breed!</text></item><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>This reminds me of the Pets vs Cattle analogy &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.engineyard.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;pets-vs-cattle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.engineyard.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;pets-vs-cattle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;With a pet, you obsess over the name and meaning of the name. With cattle, as long as names don&amp;#x27;t collide or cause problems, you couldn&amp;#x27;t care less about the name.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Pxtl</author><text>Then the paradigm is wrong.  Serving websites is the most important thing a webserver does, call it that.  If that changes, rename it.  If renaming it is impossible, you failed.</text></comment>