I am currently working on the topic of ci/cd. In one tutorial it is said that it is not desirable to create a "snowflake system". What is the meaning of this?

CodePudding user response：

In the previous video (thanks for finding it) he defines the term: A snowflake system is a group of servers that are allegedly equal, but in reality are not. Because both the servers and the installed software is maintained and updated manually, their software starts to divert (e.g. some installation failed, some server was forgotten in a deployment round).

Snowflakes look identical from a distance, but they're never equal.

The concept (or bad practice, in this case) of manually deploying is of course not limited to the Windows command xcopy. Using linux equivalents doesn't help.

CodePudding user response：

Ok. Thanks to @PMF. PMF gave me the idea to watch a previous tutorial of this and so I found out what a snowflake server is. It's about the context of the deployment to different servers. And if you do the deployment with just copying files, there can be problems. Because each server is always unique. Like snowflakes in nature. They look the same but in detail they are different or unique.

So whoever is interested or if someone has the same question in the future. This is it! :-)