Ebook
The Essential Guide to Cloud AI and Data Platforms
Learn how flexible storage for diverse data types, elastic computing power, built-in AI services, governance, and administration are needed to unlock your data’s full potential.
Product Category
The SnowflakePlatform
Serverless since its founding, the Snowflake platform is a fully managed service that is truly easy to use, connected across your entire data estate and trusted by thousands of customers worldwide.
Overview
The Unified Platform for Enterprise Data and AI
Secure and govern
Get interoperable, built-in data governance and discovery
- Manage metadata for all your data & AI assets in one place
- Centralize threat monitoring and role-based access controls across clouds.
- Easily protect all content with granular capabilities like Tag-based masking and row access policies
- Enable quick discovery across your data estate, and privacy-preserving collaboration
- Interoperate more easily across table formats, engines and catalogs
Manage cost and performance
Time is money — save both with Snowflake
- See, control and optimize your Snowflake spend through a unified Cost Management Interface.
- Check query performance easily to proactively save on costs.
- Automatically benefit from regular rollouts of performance improvements across all workloads.
Monitor, troubleshoot and debug
Get faster telemetry across your AI and data
- Start with Snowflake’s built-in observability in a few simple steps, and seamlessly export telemetry data to your preferred third-party tools as needed.
- Evaluate gen AI quality, compare model configurations and trace execution flows without exporting sensitive data.
- Address bottlenecks quicker with deeper, more unified visibility across your applications, pipelines and infrastructure.
Innovate with warehouses
Enjoy faster and easier-to-use warehouses with better price for performance
Experience 2.1x¶ faster performance for core analytics workloads with Standard Warehouse - Generation 2, Snowflake’s updated Standard Warehouse with upgraded hardware and additional performance enhancements.
- Snowflake Adaptive Compute* offers enhanced ease of use with better price for performance through automatic selection of right-sized compute resources shared optimally across an account and intelligent query routing. Use this compute service to create new Adaptive Warehouses.*
Benefits
An easy, connected and trusted platform
EASY
Accelerate time to value
Save valuable time and money with a fully managed service that scales with your needs, automates platform management, and brings AI to your data. Constantly save on costs through automatic performance improvements and built-in cost management
CONNECTED
Collaborate with cutting-edge tools
Make the most of all your data, apps and models through Snowflake’s rich ecosystem, enabled by zero-ETL sharing and interoperability with open table formats like Apache Iceberg.
TRUSTED
Reduce risk
Join Snowflake customers, representing 38% of the Global 2000#, to power your most demanding workloads on Snowflake. Get unified security, governance and business continuity, plus disaster recovery across regions and clouds — all out of the box.
"The Snowflake Data Cloud has given us the power to harness and integrate data to create insights. With data at our fingertips, we are growing revenue, becoming more cost effective and, most importantly, improving the customer experience.”
Andy Markus
Chief Data Officer, AT&T
- 84% savings on estimated annual costs, thanks to results caching
- < 1 second to answer 90% of user queries via self-service dashboards
"KFC’s data sharing processes changed from taking days to being completed in just seconds. This allows access to more data faster and allows us to achieve greater insights and enhance our advanced analytics capabilities.”
Luis Bastos
Data Architect, KFC
- 70% fewer database operational costs
- 500K+ order transactions processed daily
“We’re talking about working with sensitive patient data — data that’s related to people’s mental health and specific clinical conditions so we have to build in security, governance, auditability, traceability and compliance from the very beginning, which Snowflake helps us achieve.”
Shahran Haider
Deputy Chief Data Officer at NYC Health + Hospital
- 5 minutes to equip users with updated membership data — down from five days
- 100B+ rows of healthcare data in Snowflake provide a holistic view of patients
Resources
Discover more about the Snowflake AI Data Cloud
Get Started
Take the next stepwith Snowflake
Start your 30-day free Snowflake trial today
- $400 in free usage to start
- Immediate access to the AI Data Cloud
- Enable your most critical data workloads
Snowflake Platform
FAQs
Get common questions answered about the Snowflake platform and its capabilities.
Is the Snowflake platform serverless?
Yes, the Snowflake platform is a fully managed service with many serverless capabilities. While you configure virtual warehouses, Snowflake handles the underlying infrastructure, scaling and maintenance.
Does Snowflake work across clouds and regions?
Yes, Snowflake supports multi-cloud and cross-region operations. It’s available on major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) across numerous global regions. Snowflake’s Snowgrid enables cross-cloud and cross-region data sharing, replication for business continuity, and a consistent experience independent of the underlying cloud.
Does Snowflake offer built-in security and governance?
Yes, Snowflake has built-in security and governance features. This includes end-to-end encryption, role-based access control (RBAC), network policies, multi-factor authentication and data masking. Snowflake Horizon Catalog provides a unified governance solution with features like data discovery, compliance tools, access history and object tagging.
How does Snowflake billing work?
The two primary cost drivers are compute and storage. For compute resources, Snowflake employs a consumption-based model. Storage costs are based on the amount of data (measured in terabytes per month) stored within Snowflake. To get a detailed breakdown of our pricing and see our consumption table, we encourage you to visit the Snowflake Pricing Page for the most up-to-date and comprehensive information.
Does Snowflake provide built-in dashboards for FinOps?
Yes, Snowflake offers a unified Cost Management Interface that allows you to see, control and optimize your Snowflake spend, serving as a built-in tool for FinOps. This interface also helps you easily check insights to proactively save on costs.
What observability capabilities does Snowflake offer?
Snowflake offers several observability capabilities to monitor your account and workloads, including:
Foundation observability capabilities: Metrics, traces, logs, notifications and alerts
Infrastructure observability: Optimize Snowflake costs and performance through better resource utilization insights.
Pipeline observability: Help ensure reliable data delivery by proactively identifying and fixing pipeline failures.
Application observability: Quickly pinpoint and resolve bottlenecks in applications interacting with Snowflake.
AI observability: Accelerate AI development by confidently evaluating and improving AI agents and apps.
These features help in monitoring performance, troubleshooting and managing costs.
