Everything will ultimately fail [97 Things] : Near-Time: "Accept that, no matter what, your system will have a variety of failure modes. Deny that inevitability, and you lose your power to control and contain them. Once you accept that failures will happen, you have the ability to design your system's reaction to specific failures. Just as auto engineers create crumple zones---areas designed to protect passengers by failing first---you can create safe failure modes that contain the damage and protect the rest of the system.
If you do not design your failure modes, then you will get whatever unpredictable---and usually dangerous---ones happen to emerge."
