Snowflakes

Around the time Randy Bias gave his talk which mentioned pets versus cattle, Martin Fowler wrote a blog post titled SnowflakeServer. The post described every system administrator's worst nightmare:

• Every snowflake is unique and impossible to reproduce. Just like that one server in the office that was built and not documented by that one guy who left several years ago.
• Snowflakes are delicate. Again, just like that one server—you dread it when you have to log in to it to diagnose a problem and you would never dream of rebooting it as it may never come back up.

Martin's post is available at https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html.