We're nearing the end of Snowflake’s success story!
We’ve seen how the booming of Big Data led to a proliferation of technologies, aimed at answering the ever increasing needs in the data space.
We’ve seen how these very same technologies, being built during a pre-cloud era, had limitations that made them difficult and expensive to work with.
We’ve seen how Snowflake creators addressed these limitations by reimagining and reinventing the way data warehouses are built.
Let’s now see how the users benefit from this complete overhaul.
We need to understand that for firms, data warehousing activities can be divided into two sub-activities:
- Setup, training for and maintenance of infrastructure and tools
- Actually doing something useful with their data
The first step is a necessary evil to unlock the second, and it adds little to no value by itself. In fact, it can be considered exclusively a cost of time and resources. A big one at that.
What Snowflake does is take complete responsibility for the first step, so that firms can focus on the one that, you know, actually helps business activities.
In a nutshell and in no particular order, the practical advantages consist of:
- 📦 Allowing users to store all their data in a single place …rather than having them use multiple different systems, each one to accommodate a specific use case.
- 👌 Providing a system that can easily scale to fit the users’ needs, at any time …rather than needing to plan the capacity before even knowing what the workloads would be like, often resulting in overspending.
- 🚀 Plug and play user experiences, with familiar tools …rather than having to deal with infrastructure setup and maintenance, and having to train or recruit specialists on arcane technologies.
- 🪴 Pay per use model …rather than shedding millions up-front before one can even get started.
In other words, Snowflake is a true SaaS/PaaS (Software/Platform as a Service) offering, enabling users to perform a multitude of data related activities under one roof, paying only for what they use, and not having to deal with the costs, responsibilities and overhead associated with data warehouses that predated the Snowflake era.
