When at the Container Summit, I heard a great (if somewhat perverse) line from Jacob Groundwater of New Relic. I liked it so much, I tweeted it out immediately: If you want people to drive slower, don't give them an airbag; put a spike in their steering wheel! While a rather morbid image, Jacob hit on a core truth: if you make dangerous activities safer, people will do more dangerous things.

In one of our earlier discussions about cloud, an astute reader pointed out that one "downside" of public cloud, especially one like AWS, is that they make very few guarantees about your instances. While the system as a whole has service level agreements (SLAs), your particular instance does not. To quote: "If your instances go down you're going to have to deal with it" The underlying assumption, of course, is that you have better control over the level of availability of your particular instances and their underlying hardware, especially scheduled maintenance, when you control the entire environment rather than leaving it to a cloud provider like Amazon or Rackspace.

For years, people I have known in the VC business, as well as entrepreneurs who have been funded by VCs, have discussed the 7-2-1 rule. For every 10 investments a VC fund makes: 7 will fail - "dogs" 2 will hang around, perhaps returning the initial investment - "zombies" 1 will be a great success - "superstar" This formula is why VCs are willing to take such risks; they expect many companies in their portfolio to fail.