Walking across a tightrope is a lot easier than you would think. When you're walking on a tightrope you really concentrate on your walking; it's stressful, but not actually hard. Still, I don't think many people would choose to walk across a tightrope when an easier option was available.
Exceptions, meanwhile, allow a counterintuitive but effective strategy for greater reliability. My boss likes to say that the cloud is great because machines fail more often - the point being that rather than the impossible task of making individual machines failure-proof, you instead design systems that can handle the failure of any given machine. Often the best way to make a resilient system is to break the problem into quite coarse-grained blocks, and then define appropriate responses (such as failing a single message and processing others, or retrying the whole block) whenever a given block fails.
Exceptions, meanwhile, allow a counterintuitive but effective strategy for greater reliability. My boss likes to say that the cloud is great because machines fail more often - the point being that rather than the impossible task of making individual machines failure-proof, you instead design systems that can handle the failure of any given machine. Often the best way to make a resilient system is to break the problem into quite coarse-grained blocks, and then define appropriate responses (such as failing a single message and processing others, or retrying the whole block) whenever a given block fails.