Snowflake:A True Cloud Data Warehouse

Financial Services, Healthcare & Life Science, Retail & CPG, more and more industries are embracing the insights and solutions powered by Cloud Data Warehouses. Snowflake, a multi-cluster, shared data capable, Server-less warehouse has empowered so many industry front runners to solve their data challenges and transform into data-driven organizations.

Why Snowflake?

Organizations face numerous challenges when it comes to pivoting into data-smart operations. From the varied skillsets across User groups that could potentially derail the data management alignment, to the time-consuming maintenance tasks, data engineers have to endure in order to provide the data scientist with a reliable, model-ready data warehouse.  Every participant in the end-to-end process needs to spend extra time and resources to handle problems that come across. Snowflake takes care of a lot of these obstructions, as it welcomes Users with different areas of expertise to participate in the process.  It also requires a minimum amount of maintenance.

• Zero-management: Since Snowflake is Data Warehouse-as-a-Service, the team can achieve top performance and be most productive by spending time on their actual tasks
• Data recovery: Snowflake has a fail-safe feature that facilitates recovering historical data for a period of 7 days. Time travel feature enables the user to travel back in time and access the data which can be queried, restored or to clone important objects
• Data security: Snowflake is compliant with data security and validations. Based on this list, Snowflake facilitates features that require Users’ involvement (such as multi-factor authentication), as well as safety measures that are implemented in the back end, namely, Soc 1 and Soc 2 Type II compliance
• Secure Data Sharing: Snowflake can share the selected objects (tables, secure views, and secure UDFs)  with other snowflake accounts or read-only accounts without exposing details of the source
• Data Ingest: Along with the traditional ETL concept, we can load or unload the data in snowflake using copy command(Bulk load) and snow pipe(continuous load)  which are much faster than traditional  load

Business Benefits 

Snowflake administrates, manages, and keeps your data safe. You do not have to deal with infrastructure, optimization, security, and more. Its tier-service provides you with the most suitable plan for your needs, and you can always trust your sensitive data with the Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS).  

What this means to your business is:

• Trouble-free cloud warehouse that is reliable, easy-to-start-with, and cost-efficient
• No need for additional warehouse worker (data warehouse engineer, etc.), since you will quickly find that Snowflake is the best solution for cross-unit collaboration, despite different business units’ distinct use cases and technical levels

Furthermore, Snowflake’s Pay-as-you-go pricing structure will save your cost in the long run. With snowflake, storage and compute will be charged separately, both usage-based and per-second.
The auto-suspend and auto-scale features allow easier usage management; no more “left the instance up and running all night long” accident. Resource Monitors for account administrators facilitate close examination of the cost billed at each account level, with details of both credit usage and storage usage. 

Things to Remember

Snowflake is different from AWS/GCP/Azure. Take Amazon Web Services (AWS) for example; it is an on-demand cloud computing platform and APIs. It spans from computing, storage, networking, to database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, mobile developer tools, as well as tools for IoTs. To compare with Snowflake, a team would need to set up both Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), whereas, in Snowflake, the setup is relatively easy. 

One of the key differences worth mentioning, however, is that, with Snowflake, you can have multi-cluster warehouses, where Snowflake features Auto-Scale to allocate – either statically or dynamically, a larger pool of recourses to each warehouse. This could significantly reduce the data engineer’s hassle to either increase the size of the warehouse, or start additional warehouses and explicitly redirect the workload to the newly added warehouses. Instead, with Multi-cluster warehouse at Snowflake, your analytics team can focus on the actual tasks, without worrying about the resizing. 

Summary

In conclusion, Snowflake is not the same as AWS/GCP/Azure but runs on top of these cloud service providers with its own layers that make it more robust, efficient, and cost-effective than its competitors. Snowflake simplifies the work needed to maintain a functional, optimized, and safe data warehouse, and allows different teams to access designated datasets under appropriate roles.

Ameex is a solution partner of Snowflake. Ameex has certified Snowflake developers and consultants who are successfully helping our clients towards success. To know more write to us at analytics@ameexusa.com.