LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ContainerCon NA 2015

Many of us in the DevOps world are familiar with the pets vs. cattle metaphor when referring to virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. “Cattle” VMs are all alike, of equal importance, and easily replaced. “Pet” VMs are customized to run specific workloads, and we work to restore them when they go down. Software-defined networking (SDN) is DevOps for networking, and as such, along with network virtualization, is the basis of the cattle approach.

Let’s face it: failures happen, and inevitably at the worst times. On top of this, networks are not easily disposable, as you can’t just spin up new virtual routers and toss them if they don’t behave. But if you're using an overlay, you can simulate failures much more easily using APIs. This session will cover reconciling the “pet” and “cattle” strategies in networking, so you can keep your workloads up and running like they should.