Comment by FloorEgg

I have only had to manage this in a startup context with relatively low stakes and it was hard and messy. I don't know what best practice is at the scale that openai operates, but from my limited experience I have an intuition that the challenge is not trivial.

Also I suspect there is a big gap between best practice and common practice. My guess is common practice is dysfunctional. I would also suspect there is no standard way, but there are established practices within different technology stacks that vary between performative, barely compliant and effective at scale.

In one case I saw there was a substantial manual effort to load snapshots into instances run the delete and then save new snapshots. This was over 10 years ago though and it was more of a "we just need to get this done" than a "what's the most elegant way to do this at scale"