Live from the Velocity Conference 2013 this week, theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante invited John Allspaw for a short chat about the web, its current trends, and the ongoing event itself.

John is the VP of Tech Operations at Etsy and the author of The Art of Capacity Planning published by O’Reilly.

Talking about the web, Allspaw believes that it is not necessarily getting faster, but this is something that we should expect. He pointed out there are new standards and new practices out, video is a lot cheaper now than it originally was, and rich experiences are much cheaper to make. It is possible to make bigger, better “pipes”, but they will be absorbed and exploited to do more. Therefore, the web being faster is rather a perception than a fact.

Velocity is not the place for buzzwords & megatrends

Vellante wanted to know the reason Allspaw decided to join this particular Velocity Conference in Santa Clara. John Allspaw loves the fact that “it is a practioner-oriented conference, a community that has very low tolerance for buzzwords and hand-waving.” The attendees of these conferences have zero tolerance for words that aren’t backed up by working code and working infrastructure. “The audience at Velocity has been sharing about the types of failures and successes that they have”, not as a competitive or marketing advantage, but as a way to make things better – much like the web. That’s what sets apart Velocity from other conferences, in Allspaw’s opinion.

What is Velocity’s mission in regard to all the mega-trends?

Differentiating hyper-scale from small-scale is asking a different (and not-as-relevant) question as you might think, says John Allspaw about the dynamic of Velocity. Velocity is about web performance, bringing together front-end engineers and operators. You’d think them to be diametrically opposed, or at best adjacent, but “Velocity is about making informed design and operation decisions, and that includes trade-offs”, explains Allspaw. “Shining a light on the trade-offs, and making them explicit, that is what the conversation is about,” in Allspaw’s view.

• Design and resilience in DevOps

When it comes to design, “the question is not building it right the first time, or building it right at any part of your evolution, but it is about making it clear about what you are building, and what you expect,” says Allspaw. Many of the DevOps are familiar with the trap of spending to much time and scaling something infinitely, a poor decision especially if you have zero customers. Allspaw is more inclined to the trade-off of making those adjustments when you have a billion users already.

Allspaw is stressing out the importance of resilience. Instead of preventing failure at all costs, he’s advising DevOps to focus on better ways to absorb variations.