Consumer fulfillment behavior¶

Traditionally, Snowflake uses two primary fulfillment patterns:

Same-region access: Consumers in the same region as the provider access data directly from the provider’s account without additional replication.
Cross-region access: Providers use auto-fulfillment to replicate data and metadata to a Secure Share Area (SSA) in the consumer’s region.

The impact of failover groups for listings¶

With the introduction of failover groups for listings, Snowflake ensures that metadata and relationships remain intact in a secondary data recovery (DR) account. This capability provides a specialized access pattern designed to prevent downtime for your consumers, regardless of the region that is currently the primary.

Consumer access patterns¶

After providers configure Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) for listings, the fulfillment path depends on the consumer’s location relative to the listing’s original primary region.

The original primary region¶

In the region where the listing was originally created, sometimes called the Home region, consumers access data directly from the original provider account.

Failover status: Regardless of the failover status, even if the listing fails over to a secondary region, consumers in the original region don’t switch to an SSA.
Data updates: These consumers continue to receive fresh data through the failover group, which replicates data back from the new primary to the old primary.

Secondary and remote regions¶

For consumers located in any other region — including the region where the DR secondary account resides — fulfillment follows the SSA pattern.

Unified mount point: To ensure a seamless experience, Snowflake maintains a single mount point per region. In these regions, that mount point is the SSA.
Failover resiliency: If a failover occurs, the SSA begins sourcing its updates from the new primary account. The consumer’s connection to the SSA remains unchanged, resulting in zero downtime.

Comparison of fulfillment paths¶

The following table summarizes how fulfillment works based on the consumer location.


Consumer location	Fulfillment source	Access method
Original primary region	Original provider account	Direct share
Secondary (DR) region	SSA	Auto-fulfillment
All other remote regions	SSA	Auto-fulfillment