Chickens

In 2015,  Bernard Golden added to the pets versus cattle analogy by introducing chickens to the mix in a blog post titled Cloud Computing: Pets, Cattle and Chickens? Bernard suggested that chickens were a good term for describing containers alongside pets and cattle:

• Chickens are more efficient than cattle; you can fit a lot more of them into the same space your herd would use. In the same way, you can fit a lot more containers into your cluster as you can launch multiple containers per instance.
• Each chicken requires fewer resources than a member of your herd when it comes to feeding. Likewise, containers are less resource-intensive than instances, they take seconds to launch, and can be configured to consume less CPU and RAM.
• Chickens have a much lower life expectancy than members of your herd. While cluster instances can have an uptime of a few hours to a few days, it is more than possible that a container will have a lifespan of minutes.

Unfortunately, Bernard's original blog post is no longer available. However, The New Stack have republished a version of it. You can find the republished version at https://thenewstack.io/pets-and-cattle-symbolize-servers-so-what-does-that-make-containers-chickens/.