Pets vs. Cattle

I was at SUSECon 2015 in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, which, aside from being a great conference, was an opportunity to actually interact with my colleagues in person for a change. So I finally got to meet Adam Spiers after working-ish with-ish him for at least three-ish years (strictly speaking we’re on different-ish teams), and one of the first things he asked was for my take on the Pets vs. Cattle cloud computing metaphor, because in addition to knowing my way around high availability, distributed storage and cloud foo, my wife and I actually do farming which means I might be qualified to have an opinion on the matter.

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How to Stay Sane and Productive While Hacking FOSS on a Farm

Following is a transcript of the talk I gave at OSDC 2012. It has been edited slightly for clarity, but should otherwise be a reasonably faithful reproduction. For those following along at home, I’m sorry the slides are all images, even when they consist only of text. If there’s a better way of integrating an export from LibreOffice Impress with a hand-tooled transcript, I’m all ears. Otherwise, here goes…

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