“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 take a look at and the way manufacturing truly behaves, Gogia mentioned. Manufacturing entails drifting consumer 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 difficulty raises questions on Snowflake’s staged deployment course of. Staged rollouts are extensively misunderstood as containment ensures when they’re truly probabilistic threat discount mechanisms, Gogia mentioned. Backwards-incompatible schema adjustments typically degrade performance regularly as mismatched elements work together, permitting the change to propagate throughout areas earlier than detection thresholds are crossed, he mentioned.