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.