'cattle not pets' is not a valid argument when you're the owner and operator of the bare metal hardware. Do you also recommend that ISPs not replace failed fans in core and edge routers and optical transport systems? Let things with dual power supplies run for six months on one failed power supply?
Also you've clearly never interacted with cattle, sheep, goats, llamas or alpacas, which absolutely do get things like veterinary care and vaccinations. Large animal vet is a whole specialty and they spend lots of time working on animals other than horses. No trips to the vet???
I’ve been both farmer of black angus beef cattle (on 750 acres) right down to castrating steer, and founder/owner of the world’s largest VDN (14 international data centers) right down to pulling drives.
For what it’s worth, meat packers buy dead cattle and don’t ask questions. But this is a well known metaphor, and I’m pointing out by that metaphor, no trips to the vet. As a cattle farmer, I’d argue it holds true if you’re big enough they’ve got tags not names: the vet comes to you and only if you think you’ve got a herd problem instead of an individual problem.
As for the HN angle: these are contrarian and objection-inspiring policies that let us wholesale video delivery to/through other CDNs while making a profit.
This doesn't make sense to me. I work for a CDN with tens of thousands of servers in over a hundred data centers. We are always working to improve our turnaround time on repairing servers, even though we have thousands. Hard drive failure is one of the leading causes of server failures. Dead servers means diminished capacity, and capacity is what pays our bills.
Farmers absolutely have a vet who takes care of the cattle. I am not sure what you are on about.
The whole point of cattle-vs-pets is you are supposed to treat all the servers the same, not that you have to treat all of them poorly.
Another contrarian view — particuarly suitable for large VDN content like media, not small CDN content like html/js — is that one doesn’t need to be in over a hundred data centers, one needs to be in the key exchanges: you don’t have to be at the ends of every spoke if you pick the right hubs.
Agree swapping bad drives is a reasonable use of smart hands when done in batches, as no diagnosis is needed. I’d advocate considering extending that practice to the servers themselves. Math works if you find local tech repo/refurb shops that take gear (w/o drives) to bulk refurb & resell. The other way is to get your OEM to provide aliveness-as-a-service.
Anything so you don’t have to do manual labor, ideally ever.
