Learn extra at:
“Regional redundancy works when failure is bodily or infrastructural. It doesn’t work when failure is logical and shared,” Gogia mentioned. “When metadata contracts change in a backwards-incompatible method, each area that is dependent upon that shared contract turns into weak, no matter the place the info bodily resides.”
The outage uncovered a misalignment between how platforms check and the way manufacturing really behaves, Gogia mentioned. Manufacturing includes drifting shopper variations, cached execution plans, and long-running jobs that cross launch boundaries. “Backwards compatibility failures sometimes floor solely when these realities intersect, which is tough to simulate exhaustively earlier than launch,” he mentioned.
The problem raises questions on Snowflake’s staged deployment course of. Staged rollouts are broadly misunderstood as containment ensures when they’re really probabilistic danger discount mechanisms, Gogia mentioned. Backwards-incompatible schema adjustments usually degrade performance regularly as mismatched elements work together, permitting the change to propagate throughout areas earlier than detection thresholds are crossed, he mentioned.

