“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 approach, each area that depends upon that shared contract turns into susceptible, no matter the place the info bodily resides.”
The outage uncovered a misalignment between how platforms check and the way manufacturing truly behaves, Gogia mentioned. Manufacturing entails 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 truly probabilistic threat discount mechanisms, Gogia mentioned. Backwards-incompatible schema modifications usually 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.
