Before I started working on Dr. Werner Vogels’s keynotes, I had often heard people quote him: “Everything fails all the time.” When I finally got the chance to ask him about it, he told me that people often miss the second part of the quote, and that the second part is where the actual lesson is: “Plan for failure, and nothing will fail.” You can’t stop failure, so all you can do is prepare for it. The failures still happen. You just never feel the consequences.

Amazon S3, the wildly popular storage service, is the perfect example. Across the enormous number of hard drives behind it, disks are failing all the time, literally. If S3 weren’t built for that, people would lose data. Because it is designed on the assumption that any disk can fail at any moment, the data survives.

That is a life lesson as much as a technology one: always prepare for failure. I had learned the same lesson on stage years earlier, the day everything failed during a live show.