All Cloud, No Cattle is written and produced by Jeremy Derr.
The saying in Texas is “All Hat, No Cattle” and means that someone is full of big talk but lacking action. The idea here is that someone is dressing up like a cowboy but has never actually been on a ranch and can’t handle cattle.
In the tech world, there is a euphemism about servers being “pets” or “cattle.”
A pet server is one that has a unique name, has been running for years, which you lovingly handcrafted from artisanal bits, and which you painstakingly care for when it is sick.
A cattle server is one of many many clones and, if something goes wrong, you simply kill it and let the fleet automatically deploy an identical replacement. You spend almost no effort actually troubleshooting it, unless you see a trend of failures within the herd. The early cloud, with its virtual machines, made cattle servers the norm for many years.
But modern clouds are often filled with “serverless” technologies, where even the cattle have been abstracted away. This site started as an exercise to learn how to do a simple task - deploy a blog using mostly static content on a “serverless” stack.
This blog is, itself, all cloud and no cattle. It also happens that I talk a lot.
Essential Apps
- Atom
- Authy
- Carrot
- PagerDuty
- Reeder
- jekyll
- CodeFresh
- Terraform
Stack
ACNC is hosted on Amazon Web Services, using S3 static website hosting and CloudFront CDN. Pages are built with jekyll and distributed to S3 with CodeFresh CI.
AWS resources are managed with Hashicorp Terraform.