The idea is that if everything goes terribly wrong, at least your visitors will see something, instead of nothing.

Which begs the question: How do you like to fail?  Fail fast or fail slow? Would it be better to fail slow, where your site becomes slower and slower, or possibly just unresponsive, or would it be better to put up a quick-serving sorry page if the infrastructure melts?

A wildly successful website can easily become a victim of its own success.  Take the case of two sites that experienced exponential growth in a relatively short period of time:  Twitter.com and Myspace.com.

They took two different paths in the realm of failure.  One failed fast, and one failed slow.

Although Myspace has lost most of its lead to Facebook, it’s still a wildly popular social media site.  They had exponential growth from their start in 2003, and there were many periods of time when Myspace.com was just… slow.  Really really slow. You can’t really blame them.  It’s tough when users come faster than you can install servers and provision bandwidth.  It’s a happy problem to have usually, but it’s still a logistical challenge.

Twitter.com came around a bit later, but it also had exponential growth and problems coping.  But for the most part, they failed in a different way:  Fail Whale. When something went terribly awry, instead of a slow site, you’d get a very quick fail whale image.

Perhaps this is a matter of personal opinion, but I think if you’re going to fail, it’s better to fail quick than fail slow.  That is, have a sorry page or sorry site that comes up quick, rather than a site that is too slow for anyone to use.

The quick sorry page can be done with many of the load balancing/ADC vendors by using the backup/sorry serverfarm feature.  Keeping a group of reserve servers, serving up only a “oops, sorry about that” type of page, your own fail whale, can be better than having a really slow or unresponsive web site.

Of course, you won’t always be able to choose the method of your failure.  If your upstream ISP goes dark, there’s not much you can do (unless you have an offsite fail site).  But I personally think having a fail site is a more “professional” way to fail than having a slow or unresponsive site when things go belly up (and we all know they will).

And load balancing isn’t the only world where these multiple worlds collide.  The emerging market of WAN optimization (with products like Cisco’s WAAS, Riverbed, Bluecoat, and others) also works in multiple realms, from Layer 2 all the way to Layer 7.  Cisco routers are now ISRs, involving everything from routing to call termination.  Specialization is being redefined.

Someone with a combination of skillsets is still somewhat rare, but that’s changing.  More and more, it’s getting tougher to be just a Layer 2-3 specialty, or just a Layer 7 specialty.  It’s not a lack of smarts as to why people don’t have a combination of these skills, it’s that these career tracks have, for the most part, been very separate from each other.  I came about it fairly accidentally.   So what’s the solution?

Be a perpetual n00b.

Being a n00b is tougher than it sounds.  For starters, n00b is perhaps the highest pejorative in the nerd realm.  In an industry where knowledge and skill are the currencies of choice, acknowledging a lack of such can be difficult.

And learning, while thrilling at times and eventually rewarding, can also be unpleasant.   It requires time, practice, and determination.  There can be many moments of frustration with progress-free time spent on plateaus of learning.   And then there’s the always present aversion to “looking stupid”.  Outside of comedy, no one wants to look stupid, especially not knowledge workers.  But looking stupid and embracing your inner n00b is just an essential part of the process.

In the past few years, I’ve been doing a lot of teaching/instruction, but I’ve also been getting instruction as well.  From routing to flying a plane, I’ve been constantly learning.  I think one helps the other, and vice versa.

Technology is always changing.  An ace in one aspect technology will typically see their skill-set becoming less relevant over time.   Sure, you can make a good living on an aging skill-set (mainframe operators are still in high demand because of their rarity), but the options become more limited.

Dare to be stupid, embrace your inner n00b, and keep on learning.