Boss/Minion

Primary/secondary?

If it’s referring to something like a mother/daughter circuitboard, I’ll use that. If it’s a host/client connection, I’ll use that. If it’s a primary/backup redundancy situation, I’ll use that. And those are just a few examples. There is rarely a good reason to use master/slave nowadays, since most situations already have better descriptors to begin with.

What's wrong with primary/secondary or main/alternate!?

We're using server and agent, but im also a proponent of "captain" and "crew"

Leader / Follower

Eh it's just words and they are more common than just computers every time I work on my cars I sometimes might have to bleed the slave cylinder or fill the master cylinder when doing brake work

well, i didn't know that computer hardware could be consenting and engaged with with the BDSM community at large.

Personally i just like master/slave because it's really fucking obvious how things are supposed to work. Outside of that there are some more specific terminologies that work better in specific applications. Leader follower is pretty cringe, but mostly gets the point across. Main and sub is already established lingo in the electrical field from what i understand.

Cargo Mommy module for Rust comes to mind for me.

https://faultlore.com/cargo-mommy/book/

Main/secondary

Prime/secondary/tertiary etc

Not more wokism! Next they'll be demanding we stop talking about executing a child!

We agreed on Primary/Secondary and Primary/Replica already. Sorry.

I prefer to use Main/Sub terminology. It also works without needing to change any acronyms.

Remember when we thought being overly politically correct to absurd levels was a bad thing? That said, Dom/Sub, I'd be down for that. Same meaning, different wording, and now it's also a sex reference.

Okay but what if I’m in a server room full of switches.

Primary/secondary means they're all doing their thing, but one is preferred. There's no instruction going on between them

If you have a primary and secondary web servers, you'll use the primary first, but the secondary or secondaries are a fallback

If you have a primary and secondary drive, you have two drives, one of which is more important (probably because you booted from it). The secondary could be a copy or just another drive, either way the OS or a raid controller is managing it, one drive doesn't manage another

Similarly, we have dispatch/worker- the difference between that and master/slave is that they're different things. A master should be able to work without a slave, and a slave should be capable of being promoted to master - a dispatcher can't do the work and the worker can't take over if the dispatch goes down

The funny thing is we don't use master/slave much anymore, the whole premise is that the slave doesn't start to do what it does when it starts up. I can't think of any examples of it in the past decade - other paradigms, with a different relationship and a different name, have replaced it

It is changing, albeit slowly. In git the default branch was changed from master to main.

In high availability we use primary and secondary, or many other versions of the same idea (main/secondary, etc).

Not sure how disks are handled these days but I haven't seen the master/slave terminology in those since my first CD burner