James Brookbank (Google)

Hey folks. So my day job is helping people use cloud. But all these opinions are my own — do not tweet my boss and say that Google said something. This is just my opinions.

I'm really here for an excuse to talk about my cats. So this is Blue and Lola — this is Lola, this is Blue. I'm gonna talk about pets and cattle as well.

There's lots to cover, so we're gonna kind of go quickly — read fast. That's why they call them lightning talks.

What's all this about, pets and cattle? I think the original credit is Bill Baker and his SQL Server talk, talking about scale up and scale out.

Pets are the default. This is how servers work. It's super scary. But that's just how it is. Like, you just have to trust me.

Pets get sick. These are my poor babies when they were sick. But we get them back to fighting fit. That happens a lot — we nurse them back to health.

Cattle management is different, right? It takes a lot of work, intentional design, and there's often a lot of different teams. So, very different.

And it worked, right? Like, that's great. A lot of us do that work, and people find containers pretty useful, and kind of caught on. But only when they design them properly — like, you gotta do some actual ranching. You gotta do some real work in that space. Do not just do that [hand-wave].

And my God, there's a lot of stuff outside of runtimes, like a lot, a lot. Like, it wasn't just the containers — there's all the rest of the ecosystem.

And you know, what we get at conferences doesn't really match our lived experience. Oh — not this conference. Not here. Like, this is all authentic. But sometimes we go to conferences and people tell us it's gone this way, and then I'm like, "How about, where's your database?" They're like, "Oh no, we don't talk about the DBAs." Well — when I mention that, there's a lot of state everywhere, right? And not everything's how we thought it would be.

And we get this mixture, right, of pets and cattle throughout all our environments. Don't cross the streams. You know, we end up naming a lot of cattle. And we've all made poor choices with our pets.

It worked out. They came back. Like, the leashes worked, but it was a bit wild.

We meant it for the best, though. We were building better worlds in this. And then we spoke to those teams, and — I was that architect. Like, I was the one telling that Pod EBA. And then I looked at myself and I'm like, "What did I just say? What does that even mean? IaC databases? What have I done?"

We meant it for the best. So in theory, theory and practice are the same; but in practice, they're not.

So my ask is: please design for reality. The pets are here to stay, and they're friendly. They'll hang out. This is the unicorn. Like, they will be friends. It's okay.

The default is pets. That didn't go away. But cattle does work, when you have the time and money. Extra service: now you can hire pet sitters, like managed services that, you know, have it done for you, right? Rather than not. So feel free to do that. That's fine. But like — just pick one. When you are doing this for your services and how it works, don't mix and match. You're gonna end up dealing with the cat herding like I do.

May your queries flow and your pages stay silent. Thank you.