Snowflake is an enterprise SaaS offering. We promise the stability and support of an enterprise product. At the same time, we also promise a rapid innovation pace of SaaS. At Snowflake, this translates to deploying new versions of the software across three different cloud providers and 38 different regions every week without disrupting the customer's mission-critical workloads. Sounds quite daunting, doesn't it? For the Release Engineering team, this is our cup of tea.

At Snowflake, what do Release Engineers do?
A typical Release Engineer will wake up in the morning, brew their morning beverage, and start their daily routine of checking emails and sitting in meetings. Wait...What?!?! No! Scratch that vision!

Release Engineers still start with the same perfect cup, then check the company's pulse - is our software sane? Do we have a new version to offer? No software is perfect and we know that by heart. It is our mission to make sure the user experience is as close to perfection as possible. That means we release the software, monitor its performance, and roll forward or roll back when needed.

If it sounds like a lot of data to process and make urgent decisions, you are right! That's why we rely on Snowflake-based tooling and automation to do the heavy lifting for us. Most of our day is spent building software with tools in frameworks like Streamlit apps, Snowflake tables, dashboards, and internal automation tooling that keeps us covered. We also had a case where existing technologies did not meet our needs and ended up building our own cool framework.

You can learn a lot about the Snowflake approach to releasing software from official Snowflake documentation. However, from the inside, there is way more going on with building automation, processes, and tools to get our daily work done.

Have you ever been to a restaurant and wondered about the assembly line of chefs it took for someone to serve you a nice dinner? It’s a team effort – this is the same story for the software delivery process we have at Snowflake. It takes a village to prepare it, and it is the Release Engineering team that serves the dish.

Our goal is to release updates on a regular cadence with minimal involvement in manual work. Therefore, we are building automation to help us scale while maintaining operational excellence. Release Engineers partner with Release Managers, Development, Support, and many more, to agree on a plan of action (i.e. what, where, when) that aligns with the expectations of our customers. This is a basis for deployment intents, grouping all the cloud deployments and pacing the rollout to have reliable data for health checks.

The reality is, that a release is rarely uneventful, which is why our roles are so critical to the success of the company. Our automation not only releases software, it executes smoke tests and verifies that new software goes live in each deployment. Right before publishing, we cross-check the release with the Quality team and Development teams and actively monitor during the production rollout with a close pulse for customer escalations.

Our rule is simple - ship the tested artifact in a deterministic manner where we do no harm to the customer experience. In case of any anomalies, we roll back the software. We use that incident to improve our automated health check. This requires us to understand the nature of the issue, its symptoms, and its impact on customers. The sooner we detect errors, the sooner we remove them and keep our customers happy. Especially when we are dealing with sensitive and crucial data from our customers.

In our spare time, we love to get together to grab a pint and talk about cars, bikes, or a plethora of things. Our meetings tend to be full of fun, anecdotes, and sharing precious knowledge to help each other grow. And if you have a chance to swing by the office during breakfast or lunchtime, look for the team that’s laughing the most.