“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 relies on that shared contract turns into weak, no matter the place the information bodily resides.”
The outage uncovered a misalignment between how platforms check and the way manufacturing really behaves, Gogia mentioned. Manufacturing includes 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 broadly misunderstood as containment ensures when they’re really probabilistic threat discount mechanisms, Gogia mentioned. Backwards-incompatible schema modifications usually degrade performance step by step as mismatched parts work together, permitting the change to propagate throughout areas earlier than detection thresholds are crossed, he mentioned.
