Cross-Cloud Replication Strategies
Best practices for implementing failover groups and cross-cloud replication for business continuity.
Business continuity is no longer just a nice-to-have; it’s a regulatory requirement. Snowflake’s Cross-Cloud Replication and Failover capabilities allow you to maintain identical copies of your data and account objects across different regions or even different cloud providers (e.g., AWS to Azure).
Failover Groups vs. Replication Groups#
Snowflake offers two primary objects:
- Replication Group: Replicates data (databases, shares) but not the account-level failover capability.
- Failover Group: The gold standard. Replicates data AND account objects (Users, Roles, Warehouses, Resource Monitors) and allows you to “flip the switch” to make the secondary account primary.
Best Practice Architecture#
1. Account Object Replication#
Don’t just replicate the data. Replicating USERS, ROLES, and GRANTS is essential. Without them, your failover site
is a ghost town where no one can log in.
CREATE FAILOVER GROUP my_failover_group
OBJECT_TYPES = DATABASES, USERS, ROLES, WAREHOUSES, INTEGRATIONS
ALLOWED_DATABASES = db1, db2
ALLOWED_ACCOUNTS = myorg.aws_east_1, myorg.azure_west_europe;2. Client Redirect (Connection URLs)#
Never hardcode account URLs in your applications (e.g., xy12345.snowflakecomputing.com). Use a Connection URL
object.
- Create a specialized URL (e.g.,
data.mycompany.snowflakecomputing.com). - During an outage, you update this URL to point to the secondary account. Your BI tools and apps don’t need to change their config.
3. Cost Management#
Replication costs money (data transfer + compute for replication).
- Frequency: Do you really need 1-minute RPO? For many analytical workloads, 1 hour or 4 hours is sufficient and much cheaper.
- Scope: Exclude transient staging tables or temporary data from the replication group.
The “Fire Drill”#
A disaster recovery plan that isn’t tested is just a hope. Schedule regular “game days” where you actually failover to the secondary region. This verifies that your IAM policies, network rules, and client redirects are working as expected.
Conclusion#
Cross-cloud replication is your insurance policy. It protects you not just against cloud outages, but against regional disasters. Configure it correctly, test it often, and you can sleep soundly.