“Regional redundancy works when failure is physical or infrastructural. It does not work when failure is logical and shared,” Gogia mentioned. “When metadata contracts change in a backwards-incompatible way, every region that depends on that shared contract becomes vulnerable, regardless of where the data physically resides.”
The outage uncovered a misalignment between how platforms check and the way manufacturing truly behaves, Gogia mentioned. Production entails drifting consumer variations, cached execution plans, and long-running jobs that cross launch boundaries. “Backwards compatibility failures typically surface only when these realities intersect, which is difficult to simulate exhaustively before release,” he mentioned.
The situation raises questions on Snowflake’s staged deployment course of. Staged rollouts are broadly misunderstood as containment ensures when they’re truly probabilistic danger discount mechanisms, Gogia mentioned. Backwards-incompatible schema modifications typically degrade performance step by step as mismatched elements work together, permitting the change to propagate throughout areas earlier than detection thresholds are crossed, he mentioned.
