Build applications in the cloud like cattle, not pets, says Aaron Ansari, VP of cloud security at Trend Micro. He also strongly endorses ant relay races, but more on that later.

Here’s what Ansari means about pets versus cattle. If a beloved family pet falls sick, its owners do everything to nurture it back to health, paying no mind to the stress of midnight emergency vet visits, pricey procedures, and pet meds.

But with cattle, “you shoot it and make a hamburger,” Ansari said. For the record: he’s a vegetarian and doesn’t advocate eating meat.

“If your application is a pet, everybody gets paged at midnight, all hands-on deck, priority one, the CEO gets a phone call, we’ve got to get it back up and running, we got to do everything we can to get our environment, or application going,” he said.

However, building an application or an environment as cattle brings a whole different mindset to the problem.

“If it was cattle, if I had a duplicate environment so I could just spin up another one, what would I do? I would say kill the environment, spin up the restore backup, and let’s go,” Ansari said.

Building applications as cattle requires redundancy and configuring cloud environments in such a way that it’s easy to access cold storage and spin-up backups very quickly, he explained. This way, if the app goes down, “kill it, start up the next one, and we’re ready to go in five seconds,” Ansari said. “That is where we are moving our customers toward.”

This is still a work in progress, he admits. When it comes to cloud adoption and cloud security best practices, “more often than not, most people are still in the space of: How am I going to migrate my on-prem to a public cloud securely? I don’t have the hired resources, I don’t have the expertise in Linux to build the infrastructure.”

In addition to lacking resources and knowledge, enterprises may have just invested millions of dollars in data centers, which means it doesn’t make sense financially to migrate all of those workloads to the cloud.

“But what I love is when I see customers that are a little bit more bleeding edge, that are either a lot more cloud focused or they start to adopt and use cloud security services that are just announced,” Ansari said, noting that AWS re:Invent is right around the corner. At this annual Amazon Web Services user conference, which opens Nov. 29, the cloud giant will undoubtedly unleash a slew of new cloud security services.

“Even a year later, there’s new services that were announced a year ago that are still on the upswing,” Ansari said.

While they may not be the majority of Trend Micro and other security vendors’ customers, these cloud services early adopters are the ones that Ansari likes to talk about. “Those are the exciting ones, and we have a few customers that are doing some really fun things,” he said.

One of these fun things is called the relay with a million ants. It essentially illustrates the speed, scalability, and automation benefits of cloud versus on-premises data centers.

Imagine the lifecycle of a server as a bell curve, Ansari explained. “It’s spun up, it’s built, you add services, you build your application, and eventually it reaches peak efficiency,” he said. “There’s not too much network traffic. It’s functional. The users are good, the network latency and speed is good, compliance, configuration, security is all good.”

But eventually, a vulnerability goes unpatched, or the network can’t handle the amount of traffic, which lowers latency. Maybe the storage isn’t configured correctly, and all these factors start to hurt application performance and security.

“So now imagine with cloud,” Ansari said. “I can spin up 1,000 of those environments, all a day after each other, all at the peak of its performance. And as soon as my application reaches that peak performance, I kill it, and I moved the services to the next one that I’ve already spun up.”

As soon as the customer’s app reached peak performance, it’s handed off to the next ant. “It’s a relay race, but nobody’s really moving because you’ve spun them all up and got them ready to just take the baton and move it to the next one.”