1.4 KiB
1.4 KiB
Cattle vs Pets
Definition
An SRE principle contrasting two approaches to managing compute resources. "Pets" are unique, manually nurtured servers treated as irreplaceable individuals. "Cattle" are identical, replaceable units that can be killed and regenerated without ceremony. The Knock-out multi-agent pattern applies this principle to LLM agents.
Pets (Don't Do This)
- Named, individual servers you care about personally
- Hand-fed, manually configured, lovingly maintained
- You try to heal them when sick
- Failure of a pet is a crisis
Cattle (Do This)
- Identical, replaceable instances
- No names, no emotional attachment
- If one fails, you kill it and spin up a new one
- Failure of cattle is routine — the system continues
Application to LLM Agents
- Don't name your agents or hope they "do well"
- Spin up agent → check its work → kill it if it fails
- Each agent is interchangeable with the next
- The process (not the individual) is what matters
Why This Matters
- LLMs are inherently stochastic and unreliable
- Treating them as pets leads to emotional attachment to broken processes
- Enterprise AI needs reliability through architecture, not through hoping individual agents succeed
- Kill failing agents quickly to reduce cost and noise